Holy crap, I propose T-SQL gets killed and replaced with ANSI SQL... I've been working with enterprise databases for almost 15 years now (plus a few more in general programming) and never have I ever read a manual for a string length function! You just google " string lenght" and notice the snippet of the first post "select len(mycol) from.." and there you go, you know it. I would NEVER expect a len() to function as len(rtrim())... that's just insane; any other programming languages do this sort of (sorry, but it is...) idiotic thing? :wtf: The more I learn about TSQL, the more I enjoy the fact the most of the bigger companies use Oracle DB... :-O Maybe next time I get a client with MS (so rare, w00t), I'm really gonna have to RT(whole)FM, even for very standard functions like len()!!?!? Insane, I tell you! Maybe I'll find that substr() doesn't consider ponctuation or something...??