Hi My original question: I've got an attribute column that i need to split. The problem is that i do not want to split after a fixed number characters...for example i have the following enteries: 1 smith st 100 west st 223 smith st 15 south rd 7 main drive I want to split the record on the space between the character's...how can this be done? ************** The responses were numerous and far to many to mention, however i'm grateful to all that took the time to reply. It seemed that there were a couple of possible options. What follows is summary of the different response. I tried the Extract request which worked well as well as the AsTokens one. Then I got the extension which worked wonderfully and simplified the whole process. I've also tried the other method with similar success and achieved that i wanted. Thanks alot list members... -------- 1. Use .Extract request -------- 2. use the request ASTOKENS and specify " " (a space) as the item to use to split the string -------------- 3. Import this file into you word processor (Notepad, Word, etc) and use the 'replace' command to replace the 'space' with "," (include the "s to create unique string fields) throughout your file. --------- 4. use aString.AsList "1 smith st".AsList.Get(0) will return you "1" "1 smith st".AsList.Get(1) will return you "smith" and so on. It is a good idea to use Trim request in order to clean the eventual double spaces. aString.AsList.Get(0).Trim If you have different separator you can use aList = aString.AsTokens("separator") request --------- 5. Since I have only done this a couple of times, I am probably not the best person to advise you. That said, here are a couple of the pitfalls I found. Remember that there are streets with spaces in the name... like 1234 Live Oak Drive. If you try to split this on the first and second space, then you would get 1234 as the number range and only "Live" as the street name. Check over your data. In my case some addresses had building number at the end, some had the street-type (way, drive, etc) omitted. This made a difference in how I split the numbers, because I had trouble when I checked for street type - it just wasn't there! Find out if this is a "one off" project, or if you will be doing this on an ongoing basis. I started to set up a program to take in a file and do this, but I found that we would only be using this data source once. I just did the split in MS Excell (There were less than 64K addresses). The way I did it in MS Excell was to NOT let MS split the addresses. Column A is the original data, and then I calculated into other columns the parts I needed using various string functions (left$, right$, mid$, len and value, etc). For the numeric address part, I assumed that in the city, no address had more than 5 digits. So I tested the left 5 characters of the string. If the value of the first two characters was greater than just the first, I used the first two. If the value of the first three characters was greater than the first 2 then I used 3, etc. For the street type I started from the right side of the string. The remaining area in the middle (minus the spaces on the ends) I used as the street name. Not 100 percent, but very close. One other solution is to geocode the addresses you have in Arc View. You will have to maunally geocode those that do not match. You will get an Arc View Address for the ones that get geocoded. If anyone answers that has a script for splitting address, ir if there is, indeed, a FAQ on this, please let me know. You never know when someone will ask to have addresses split. ----------- 6. The Split Fields extension should help you out (avaialble on the ESRI website, or email me if you want a copy). Suggest you try it out on copies of your data, and determine its usefulness or otherwise for your purposes. Works on dBase files only. Do NOT run this utility on a table that has been loaded into the project - its been written to read the dbase files directly from disk. Make sure that you specify an adequate number of fields - the utility will fail with an error message if you specify say 3 output fields, but 4 splitted fields are subsequently found in the table. You will then have to delete the new fields from the table, and try again with a larger number of output fields. Load the extension listed as "Split Field", after copying the attached file to the usual place (c:/esri/av_gis30/arcview/ext32) This adds a menu named "Table" with a menu item "Split Field" in the Project GUI. You can/must specify - the table(s) to split (as many as you want, hold shift key while selecting, making sure all tables have the same field that is to be split) - the name of the field to split (the source field) - the separator character to split on (, or / or - or space or whatever) - the number of output splitted fields - the name of the output fields. If you give "Newtag" as the output field name and 3 output fields, 3 new fields named Newtag1, Newtag2 and Newtag3 will be created and populated from the source field. The table(s) is(are) added to the project after processing. ************** Vishanth Singh GIS Support Technican Corporate GIS - Land Information Systems Durban Unicity South Africa gisusers@webmail.co.za ______________________________________________________________________ http://www.webmail.co.za the South-African free email service Printer repairs & spares, PLUS a discount http://www.laserrepairs.com