You need to use regular expresions, I think there is a regex_replace frunction (or something like that). http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/helpsheets/regex.html is a fairly good introduction to regular expresions - learn to love them ;) >>> Vikram Vaswani <mister_freehand@xxxxxxxxx> 01/17/05 03:27pm >>> Hi I have a string like this: ---- Just when you begin to think the wagon of Vietnam-grounded movies is grinding to a slow halt, you're hit squarely in the face with another one. However, while other movies depict the gory and glory of war and its effects, this centres on the psychology of troopers before they're led to battle. ---- I need to know the index position of every occurrence of the pattern "the" in the string above, and replace it with something else. Specifically, I need the position of the last, first and third occurrences of "the". I'm totally lost as to how to do this. Could someone help me out? TIA, Kam --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential. It is for the intended recipient only. If you have received the email in error please notify the author by replying to this email. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not disclose, distribute, copy, print, or rely on this email. Any views expressed by an individual within this email which do not constitute or record professional advice relating to the RNLI, do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisation. Registered Charity Number 209603 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php