I am attempting to parse information from a message that is proving difficult. The data is of the form; this data:should be:parsed:on colons but the only tool I have to use is ESTRING since the text between the : characters may contain spaces. The problem is that ESTRING will return the text AND the : following it. I got to thinking some more (and that is dangerous for everyone) and realized that I can not parse the key words are (one two three) to look at and get a variable that matches (one two three) because QSTRING does not include the braces. I would like to see something like ESTRING - return all the text up to and include the terminator character eSTRING - return all the text up to but NOT including the terminator character But now I have a problem. For consistency I would like to see QSTRING - return all of the quoted text including the quote characters qSTRING - return all of the quoted text excluding the quote characters. These would be consistent with ESTRING and eSTRING but would be inconsistent with the current use of QSTRING. There was a recent patch submitted for SET, that I would change to MSET - return all of the text (M)atching any character in the set mSET - return all of the text not (m)atching any character in the set So I am asking for suggestions on how to get my new eSTRING and my changed QSTRING functionality? comments? suggestions? Evan