What an elegant solution. Kudos

Glenn

>This will remove any chars that was not in the inner chrtran:
>
>

>cMixed="MESS:(999) 999-9999"
>cNumOnly=chrtran(cMixed,chrtran(cMixed,"0123456789",""),"")
>

>
>HTH
>
>>Hi all:
>>
>>I currently have an Excel spreadsheet with data from an MDB file, which I plan to insert into a new VFP free table.
>>
>>

USE Details
>>ZAP
>>APPEND FROM c:\Delta\Clients TYPE xls

>>
>>The above code works. I proceed to select information from Details.dbf into a cursor and then assign some variables their values from the fields in the cursor.
>>
>>Problem: There is one field which contains the phone numbers along with their area codes, formatting and sometimes it even contains text e.g.
>>
>>

MESS:(999) 999-9999

>>
>>How do I parse the numbers only i.e. only the 9999999999, so that I can assign this vlaue to a variable which will then be inserted into the main client table.
>>
>>Thank you for your guidance.