Thanks for your reply, it totally makes sense, however I wasn't explicit enough in my question.

You've coded the search pattern specifically for the example I gave above, but truly, the 4 or 5 characters in the second column could be ANY character, and not necessarily be delimited by ' as they are in the example above.

After having thought about this, the two things I can guarantee are:

1. The first three characters are FIXED.

2. There is a space between every column

3. The second column is at least 1 character, and at the most 5 characters

So my problem is truly that I have columns delimited by spaces, (nothing I can do about that) and the second column may actually have within it, a space...!!

Any more ideas?

Cheers
Sam