>>>I want to locate and extract a YEAR in a text string (a reference). The year is always 4 digits as in 'the book was published in 1806 or later'. Is there an easier way to do this than a rather clumbsy parsing prg I have written.
>>
>>? val(chrtran(lcStr,chrtran(lcStr,'1234567890',''),''))
>>
>>Cetin
>
>Be aware that it'll work properly only if you don't have any other digits beside year in the string.

Sure Sergey,
OTOH w/o natural language parsing there is no way to determine if any 4 digits represent year too ('published only 1903 copies'). So I assumed digits encountered would be year.
Cetin