Hi Sergey

DOH!! Of course! You know, that wasn't a concern before as I've only just put the if statement in, as I realised I was doing the table look-up repeatedly, unnecessarily, so I'd lost sight of the set exact.

Knew there had to be a "logical explanation for this".

Anyway - excellent service - I'd just nipped out to buy a sandwich, and the reply was there waiting for my return! Thank you. I guess your batteries are wll charged up today :-)

Terry

>Terry,
>
>With SET EXACT OFF lcCIFCCode = "" will always return true because VFP compares the left side to the lenght of the right side, which is 0. Because of that lcCIFCCode <> "" will aways return false. It's covered pretty well in VFP help for SET EXACT command. You can either change comparison to exact

If NOT (lcCIFCCode == lcPrevCIFCCode)

or assign inital value to lcPrevCIFCCode that never occurs in data

lcPrevCIFCCode = "??????"

>