is why I would do it my way. I do this stuff all the time and am pretty good at it and I needed to take a second look at that conversion to really see what it was doing. The issue may be less in the functions used than in the combined, compact nature of the text. But there is alot going on in a very small piece of code with nothing to tell you what is happening in the middle. That is the perfect blueprint for "hard to troubleshoot".