Sam:

>Jill, I think that for your function to work the string has to be in the "correct" date format corresponding to the current SET DATE TO setting and be a straight character string e.g. "06/31/2001" and not in the format ^2001-06-01 or did I miss something?

Using "^2001/06/01" works just fine (without the curly brackets). I have utilised Jill's suggestion using the previous format and it works like a charm, irrespective of the SET DATE TO setting.