First, thanks to everyone who replied.

Ed, your'e right about type() and the array existing first. I ended up with following (thanks to Perry for the _tally tip):

if _tally = 0
laSelCats[1] = ""
endif

which works for me. They way the code is written there is _always_ only one element in the array prior to select not finding a match.

Question though. If I use laSelCats = NULL, won't that screw the reference, same as replace does?

Also Barbara had mentioned problems with _TALLY and arrays. Anyone know what those problems are?




>>Check the Type() value of the item in laSelCats[1,1]. If it's "U" the array is empty. _Tally doesn't work correctly on arrays I've found.
>>
>Barbara, since the array exists already in his example and is scoped as PUBLIC, I think he'd be better off doing something like:
>
>DIMENSION laSelCats[1,1]
>laSelCats = NULL
>
>before the Select, and then check ISNULL(laSelCats[1,1]) afterwards to see if anything happened.
>

-snip-