Hi Rory, 'Course some of us old-timers have also pulled our behinds out of the fire more than once by having an ASCII-EBCDIC conversion table handy.... http://www.natural-innovations.com/boo/asciiebcdic.html [Hint: can come in handy when receiving data from some old legacy system and wondering what all those weird characters in your numeric fields are for. Just don't try to pronounce it near impressionably young management types!] RonL. -----Original Message----- From: Rory.Plaire at wahchang.com [mailto:Rory.Plaire at wahchang.com] Sometimes, when dealing with the lower level of computer architecture, we have to put up with arcane and exotic representations of our own creativity. ASCII is one of them.