thanks for your attention, I was getting to the same conclusion.

the problem is that this is coming in from a java front end in a predominantly database agnostic application, so I don't know that I could use the sql server...

I messed up the escape characters in the example, sorry

select mpe_join('select fname||'' ''||lname from table1 where') as namelist, somecol,someothercol

from sometable

the developers use the oracle function like so:

select mpe_join('select fname||' '||lname from table1 where') as namelist, somecol,someothercol

from sometable

to get back something like

namelist ...