Gerry, You asked "What are you trying to accomplish ?"

What I'm try to do is understand why this is a feature of foxpro? It seem to me that if someone had intended to have a macro expanded when doing a variable assignment it would be done explicitly - like this:

 sStringVariable = "someValue " + &localVarName + " someOtherValue"

Not within a string literal... To me this doesn't seem right. If I were new to fox and read code like this:

 sStringVariable = "someValue " + "&" + "localVarName someOtherValue"

I would think why is somebody concatinating 3 string literals, why isn't this one sting literal?? Also you'd think the FoxPro compiler would be smart enough to see that the ampersand is with in a string literal so don't expand anything.

Thanks for all the solution that you offered. However, when I first ran into this behavior I had already figured out the solution/workaround.

One more thing, I searched Fox Help on this behavior and I couldn't find anything that explains why this is a good thing. Can somebody point me to this?