>Does anyone know a simple command to get rid of all non-printable characters from a field. I have a nomenclature field and the user has been entering some carriage returns, tabs, and control characters (inadvertantly) Is there a way that I can get rid of those characters and leave the alpha numeric printable stuff. I know I can do a loop reading every character and checking for its ascii value, but what I was looking for was a function that can be used in a replace statement. TIA

The easiest thing to do would be to create a string containing all characters you want filtered from the file, and then do the following

* I assume that cFilteredChars contains the list of characters to remove
* and cFld is the field to be stripped
REPLACE ALL cFld WITH CHRTRAN(cFld,cFilteredChars,'')

putting together the list should require a little work; essentially, if only standard printed ASCII characters were acceptable, then you could build cFilteredChars at least in part using:

cFilteredChars = ''
LOCAL i
FOR i = 0 TO 31 && characters below " " are Control characters
   cFilteredChars = cFilteredChars + CHR(i)
ENDFOR
FOR i = 128 TO 255 && high-order bit set is bad
   cFilteredChars = cFilteredChars + CHR(i)
ENDFOR

You could then concatenate any others you want to strip.