>>Not useless; that's what it's there for.
>
>True, but since its hardly used, its not self documenting, where a whopping function call is.

Well, if it's not a Replace but something to be used to create a column in an SQL statement - you bet the speed tip would mean a lot. I've seen some of those where the string minus not only did the trick (specially as it preserves the total length of the resulting string, which also means something to the SQL column created), but was significantly faster.