My guess is that the original poster had requested information the ability to perform searches using expressions like "\<this\>" where the "\<" and "\>" signify the beginning and ending of a word respectively (this is the expression used by the grep utility in UNIX). The AT() and ATC() functions will only tell you if a substring exists, but will sometimes yield a false match. For example you search for "word" in the string "wordprocessing", the AT() and ATC() functions will return false matches if you're interested in strictly the existence of the word "word". I don't know if regexp type searches have been implemented in VFP.