Nerissa,

I would bet that the first record returned in the SELECT has 7 characters in that field. This would limit the length of the field in all subsequent records. Try padding the result (I chose 20 as the length...adjust this to your liking):

select IIF("." $ objectname, ;
   PADR(SUBSTR(objectname,1,AT(".",objectname)-1),20), padr(objectname,20)), ;
   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