>
>it is somewhat hard to know where a table name begins in (at least for the examples
>you gave you can find where each name ends with an AT() and other such commands
>if there was a space before each table it would be easier
>note however that what ever you do will also return object names from expressions


If your expression always uses '.' and '*' characters, how about something like this:

lcInput = 'mytable.amount*yourtable.rate*anotherTable.taxes'

DO WHILE LEN(lcInput) >0
  
  *search for the first dot
  ? substr(lcInput, 1, AT('.', lcInput)-1)
  
  *search for the next table
  lnNextTable = AT('*', lcInput)
  IF lnNextTable > 0
     lcInput = substr(lcInput, lnNextTable+1, LEN(lcInput))
  ELSE
     lcInput = ''
  ENDIF

ENDDO

Claude