I actually don't use character codes like this - I'll use a numeric and interpret it later. I'm not much on setting control values in code - I try to bind to the data as much as possible.

Where the code isn't the first character, if I stored characters, I'd probably use one of your original ideas of binding the number to a form property.

>Interesting. Is this what you normally do? What of cases where the code is not the first letter of the caption?
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>Any other ideas?
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>Alex
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>>In VFP, an option button can be bound to a character field in its ControlSource - which will tie to the caption of the selected button.
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>>If you wanted to do this for the M/F optiongroup, you would need to
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>>set the optiongroup.Value to the empty string or "M" or "F",
>>make the button captions just "M" and "F" and add labels for "Male" and "Female" and line them up with the button captions
>>I'd go ahead and use "Male" instead of "ale" for the label - it's easier to line up the captions that way. Also, it helps if the optiongroup and buttons and labels have their BackStyle = 0 (Transparent) - at least when lining them up.
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>>HTH