Has anybody encountered an error in using SUBSTR() with SELECT-SQL code?

select IIF("." $ objectname, ;
SUBSTR(objectname,1,AT(".",objectname)-1), objectname), ;
from childtable

This code returns only up to 7 characters. I noticed that if the objectname before the period is greater than 8 chars., it outputs only 7 characters. My examples are objectname="specsupus.free","special.free","address1.free","disc.free".

The statement above returns
specsup
special
address
disc

Is there any flag that affects this output that I should set to ON or OFF?

Thanks a lot for th ehelp.

Nerissa