Thanks for your comments Paul. I appreciate the time you took. I will have a look at the Archive for something that may help. Do you think I am on the right track? Is there a different approach I could take? Full text of my previous mail is at http://www.sps-spitech.com/wap/utf8.txt Please ignore the question re Hex to Long (I found out that the long() function has an optional 2nd argument)