Jim,

This what I tried;

lcstr = "xxx" + CHR(9) + "yyy"
STRTOFILE(lcstr,"Junk.txt")
lcVar = FILETOSTR("Junk.txt")
?ASC(SUBSTR(lcVar,4,1))

And I get 9 as the output. How are you confirming that the CHR(9) was converted to spaces?