That's a good idea. The chrtran() worked. Thanks!

>>I have a very big table I have to manipulate. It has recently tripled in size to over 3 million records. One of the fields is a social security field, char (9). One of the things I have to do is get rid of the empty ssn fields. Some though, have a "0" or "000000000" in them. When I try to get rid of these records using
>>

WHERE VAL(ssn) = 0

>>I am getting a numeric overflow error. Any ideas on how to get around or solve this?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Kevin
>
>I suspect you get a numeric overflow for some other values, like values containing an "e": 11e1111 would cause numeric overflow, for instance (this particular example means 11 * 10^1111).
>
>If the values you gave as an example are the only values you want to check for, you might do a:
>
>

>... where inlist(ssn, "         ", "        0", "000000000")
>

>
>Or perhaps you may want to check whether zero and space are the only symbols used:
>
>

>... where empty(chrtran(ssn, "0", " ")
>* or:
>... where empty(chrtran(ssn, "0", "")
>