>Hi Ed,
>
>>That should work fine, and be quicker as well. The key is that both characters have to be replaced, and that they need not occur in matching pairs.
>
>Right, if you noticed my version had a chrtran instead of a strtran, which means the pairs thing is irrelavant right?
>
>try:
>?chrtran('m1i5k2e','1234567890','')

Correct - the character is in the second expression is replaced with the equivalent character in the third expression. STRTRAN() is needed when the string that need to be found for replacement is more than 1 character or where the replacement string for a given item is more than 1 character long, so that if you only wanted to strip CR/LF pairs (CHR(13)+CHR(10)), or wanted to replace each CHR(13) with the string "CARRIAGE RETURN", you'd have to use STRTRAN(). For example, I use the followiung to strip down multiple linefeeds to a single linefeed:

STRTRAN(test string, CHR(10) + CHR(10), CHR(10))

CHRTRAN() is better and faster in the case we're looking at, especially since it only has to be invoked once, and does it's thing in a single pass.