Excellent. Index did the trick. I think indexing is the better solution than character replacement since I don't have to think about all possible characters that could cause issue, and it just does the comparison character by character regardless, which is really what I want in this case. Expanding the regular expression is also extremely useful and I use it a lot in other applications but thought I had to explicitly enable it (with eval) rather than explicitly disable it somehow. Anyhow. Thanks for the solution :) BR, Steve