Thanks for the suggestions. I know we are in the neighborhood with the 'special character' issues.
but neither of those worked. I was also looking for some clipper commands. Like go to the end of this string and chop off 1 character.
lot of remove carriage control code. (trim) But nothing yet that just says .... kill the last character.
Anyway the '&' is very special. grrrrrrr
kc