>>Oh wonderful! You were right! It does work now! 1000 hugs!
>>
>>thank you
>>Judith
>
>Judith,
>
>To add to what Tamar said, when you trim things they can run together. Thomas Ter and Thom Aster could end up the same if trimmed. Best to use the whole field.

Years agao, I used to maintain programs where we had to make use of a lot of trimming and substrings (with the last parameter omitted -- so variable length strings were returned). We were basically extracting short expressions that could be in variety of places in the field. To maintain a fixed length index of the length we wanted we allways did something along the lines of LEFT(ALLTRIM(varexpr)+space(50),50). These days you could make use of PADR to do the same thing.