>fred thank you...this is the cituation
>a harris pbx thows information into my database..
>my field is a character field
>and it comes like this 990501
>i used substr(view2.answertime,1,2) + ":" + substr(view2.answertime,3,2) to format it into 05/01/99 still in characters...
>the question is how do i formate it into May-05-99 instead.....

You still need to get it into a date variable, even if only temporarily, to get the month. Then you can build a new character variable in the format you want.

dVar = CTOD(SUBSTR(x,3,2)+'/'+SUBSTR(x,5,2)+'/'+SUBSTR(x,1,2))
YourNewString = CMONTH(dVar)+'-'+SUBSTR(x,5,2)+'-'+SUBSTR(x,1,2)