I am writing a program to find changes between old and new "backups"  of a membership database. In particular I want to extract e-mail addresses that have been removed and those that have been added.

Problem is that the find function does not seem to work properly on e-mail addresses, and the "@" character is the villain of the piece. Just try a manual find on a field you know exists but contains "@" - it cannot be found!

Am I being totally stupid, or is it a problem with a simple solution?

Thanks for advice

when I do a find in a email field and type "@" it pulls all the records with a email address.

I have a field called "email" and there are many records where this field is populated with a valid email address. I manually copy an address from any record, hit "find",  paste the address into the "find" email field and then enter. "No records match this set of find requests' is always the answer.

If I then keep repeating the find after deleting the last character, then next-last etc. the find starts to work when I have deleted the @

But I spent a long time examining my script for errors before I worked out this simple test!

PS I am using FileMaker Pro 8 Advanced

The Problem is that the @ symbol means one character in a find in FM. If you enter find mode and click on the symbols tab in the left you will notice the types of symbols and what there meaning is. You need to use quotes before and after the @ symbol to make it a literal search on the @ character. Then it should pull all your records with @ in the email field. Is this what you are wanting to do, or am I misunderstanding?

Tcoyle, you understood perfectly!

I was performing a loop to copy each email address from "old records" to a variable, then pasting the variable into the search field of  "new records" and performing the search to see if the email address was still valid. Of course, I now see why that failed.

Solution was to amend the Set Variable line to incorporate a Substitute function when copying the old email address, thereby changing the single-character @ to the three-characters "@" during the copying process.

Many thanks!

PS I wanted to copy a few of the actual script lines into the above message for the possible benefit of others who may not have fully understood - but I have never yet managed to copy scripts FROM FileMaker TO a text edit program. Any suggestions about that one?