Great "thinking outside the box" Sean - I know that I personally hate parantheses as much as I hate the single/double quotes - especially in really lengthy expressions...going to try that out with ascii as well...got to think of a really meaningful variable name though - I knew that 'SQ' was single quote but I'm so used to looking at phrases with SQL in it that I had to keep reminding myself that this was not 'truncated SQL'!!