Robert,

It like this is a new bug, or at least an undocumented feature change *s*

I was just giving you a workaround, because it won't be fixed for a while at best. So I'd restructure your code with an IF:

lcBuffer = eval(...)
if ( ! type( "lcBuffer" ) $ "CM" )
   lcBuffer = transform( lcBuffer )
endif

You might also want to check something else when dealing with memos and long strings while building HTML code. The code that converts my Q&A table into the pages themselves uses TEXTMERGE and VFP has the hugely annoying bug that inserts chr(13)s into the output based on SET MEMOWIDTH. so some of my tables were getting screwed up because of this. I avoid the problem by doing a SET MEMOWIDTH TO 8192 and put the long strings to the output file in 512 byte chunks.

>it is character data most of the time but not always. The datatype of the field might be numeric from time to time. Since the documentation of VFP states that TRANFORM() leaves character data unchanged, I decided to do it without an IF/IIF statement (you delivered the meta statement in your answer) and transform always.
>
>The problem I see here is that it worked before VFP 7 and didn't find the changed behaviour documented.