Hi Dan and tiphipps, I tried Dan's approach, but because I want this to work on every column, all or only one of which can displayed (based on a users cookie preferences), I went with tiphipps solution. This worked very well. Simple too.
In testing, tiphipps method turned out to be much faster, probably because it is not calling this new parser each time? Anyway, thanks so much for all the help to both of you - much appreciated!!!