Are you allowed to create new index? Index on COURSEID + "UNKN" + CLASSID would resolve your problem.

>Okay, here's the situation, operating in VFP 5.0:
>I have been given a form I need to modify. The form currently matches a field in one table (coursgiv) to many fields in another table (courinst). coursgiv is course information where courinst is a list of instructors and their hours. They are supposed to be associated by the common field "COURCLAS".
>Both tables, COURSGIV and COURINST, contain the fields CLASSID, COURSEID, and COURCLAS.
>COURCLAS is supposed to be a created as COURSEID-CLASSID (with the hyphen between them). However, in the courinst table, there are many records that became COURSEIDunknCLASSID (with the letters UNKN instead of a hyphen).
>
>The form achieves the match of COURCLAS (it appears to me) through the data environment, in a relationship line where the relation is between courgiv's field COURCLAS and courinsts's index COURCLAS. The RelationalExpr is simply COURCLAS.
>
>I need to modify this relationship somehow to include matches of coursgiv.COURCLAS to courinst.COURCLAS *and* matches of coursgiv.COURCLAS to courinst.COURSEID + "UNKN" + courinst.CLASSID.
>Or match coursgiv.COURCLAS to strtran(courinst.courclas, "UNKN","-"). How can I achieve this in the data environment? Or can I?
>
>No modifications to the tables or indexes (such as cleaning the data, which would be my preferred solution as well) are an option. Any suggestions of a workaround?