>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?

I don't have specific, repeatable examples I can give. However, we use arrays a lot in one app and I found that in several cases where the code SEEMED to be cut/paste from existing, working code that _tally simply gave the wrong answer. Since I was using local, not public variables, it might have been that intermittantly I had a pre-existing array which didn't get "zapped". We went to the type() command and had no further problems.