/ Yesterday she discovered that at least in some circumstances it returns / a U when it should return a C. (VFP 3.0b) Has anyone found a fix or a / workaround for this problem? As Microsoft would have put it, "the behaviour is by design". The expression whose type we examine at the moment evaluates to nothing. The variable doesn't exist or it's out of scope. Try this xx=99 ?type("xx") && should return "N" release xx ?type("xx") && should return "U"