>I am trying to move a string of characters into a date field in a foxpro table. The characters are in the format mmddyy in the call detail record i am pulling them from using substr on fixed width records. I tried using a val command on the characters, but got a data type mismatch. I was using a numeric field before and it worked just fine but the reason i need it to be date field is because when i try and sort the records, if they are numeric, 011501 (jan 15th, 2001) comes before 123100 (dec 31st 2000) which it obviously shouldn't. What can i do?

try creating a Date from them:

cStringDate = '123100'
dDate = DATE(VAL(RIGHT(cStringDate,2)),VAL(LEFT(cStringDate,2)),VAL(SUBST(cStringDate,3,2)))