>Can anyone tell me how I can find special characters in a field that has the folloiwng format: AAA-AAAA-AAAAA


Define what you mean by special characters? Do you mean that the fields are supposed to contain upper case letters in the 'A' positions and '-' in the rest? If so, use the same basic approach I used with Nadya:

oRegExp = CREATEOBJ('vbscript.regexp')
oRegExp.Pattern = '^[A-Z]{3}-[A-Z]{4}-[A-Z]{5}$'
oRegExp.Test(cMyString) && .t. if it matches, .f. if not