Thanks David

I will have to find a work around so I can analyze the data that contains several of these strings in the unique ID field. It has sure played havoc with trying to use the Set Key To command in child table data when the parent ID ends in "&&".

Simon


>Simon,
>
>The VFP parser is quite literal when it parses a line of code, if it sees && at any point in the line it ignores the rest of the line.
>
>It does not pay attention to the fact that you had the && in a string literal. It sees the line of code as this:
>
>lcTxt = "
>
>which is an invalid statement.
>
>This also extends to ¯os which will expand inside a string literal, which has always annoyed me. Literals should be sacrosanct.
>
>m = "i6"
>lcX = "m&m"
>? lcX && you don't get the candy, you get the British spy agency instead
>
>>If you try any of the following you get an error in VFP 7 and VFP8.
>>
>>lcTxt="&&"