On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 5:32 PM, William Wagman <wjwagman@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > Jared, > > I'm not sure I understand how that would help, there's no space in the > data so INSTR(FOO,' ') returns zero. The dump returns this… > As others have pointed out, that likely isn't the problem anyway. The INSTR() function used would only look for spaces. There are other characters that don't display (tab for instance) and can cause funny things to happen with the data. DUMP() is how you can see what is really in the data. -- Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist