>Is there away to display a 9 (or an X, #, etc.) as part of the inputmask? That is, I want the user to see the 9. Is there someway to just escape special characters like this, so VFP will treat them like a regular character?

Hi Joel. It looks like you have stumped everyone. One idea is to build a custom control, if that suits your purpose. IE If you wanted

123#121#12

You could have a control made up of three textboxes with two # labels between.