You already got good answers from others. To reiterate, it makes more sense not to remove the spaces but to do the substitution of other characters while leaving the spaces in place. Substitutions are done usin STRTRAN() for strings and CHRTRAN() for individual characters.

>hey everyone,
>i have a series of tables which need to be corrected. the problem is that the tables have a column which the path is stored. the data within the column looks like the following:
>
>(the hyphens represent spaces)
>c:\something-----c:\something\somethingelse------c:\something\somethingelse\this
>
>
>
>i need to replace the c: with d: and also make some other changes. the changes will be uniform through-out all the programs.
>
>how do i take the spaces out of the table, make the corrections, and then restore the table back to the way it was with the new corrections(i.e. add the correct number of spaces back)? any help would be appreciated. thank you.