Thanks for the helpful responses on this question. A complication is that while I want to get rid of invisible characters that cause seeming-numbers not to be numbers, I don't want to exclude all non-numbers from my table. But since it seems that fonts and systems will differ as to which characters are actually invisible, I will need to purge even harmless visible characters. So my current plan is to use this function:
function scrubbedText txt -- For tab-delimited data, replace possibly invisible characters with a space; and then -- remove leading and trailing spaces from each cell repeat for each char k in txt if charToNum(k) > 31 or charToNum(k) < 127 then put k after hold else put space after hold end repeat set itemDelimiter to tab repeat for each line k in hold repeat for each item i in k put word 1 to -1 of i & tab after k2 end repeat put return into char -1 of k2 put k2 after hold2 put empty into k2 end repeat return hold2 end scrubbedText If anyone sees a way to do this without stepping through each character, or without excluding non-standard visible characters, suggestions are welcome. David Epstein _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode