i'm having a really weird problem with one record in one database. i have a firstname and a lastname field in the db, among many other fields. one particular record has a lastname Indech, MD. frequently when i view the database it displays this record with quotation marks like mary "Indech, MD" although no quotation marks were entered. when i modify the record to remove the quotation marks the lastname field is blank so i reenter the info without the quotation marks. it displays fine for awhile then messes up again. i have viewed the log and there is no record of any other modifications to this record. i'm guessing that something is happening when the database is being read and rewritten by some other action that is causing the output of this record to mess up but i can't figure out what. can anyone give me any insight? thanks.

How big (in megabytes) is your db?

Can't imagine how the quotes are getting there but sometimes records get "off" and it causes the rest of the db fields to be skewed... meaning city name prints in the state field, etc.

Try pulling the db into excel and see if you notice any "alignment problems", but I don't think that'd cause the quotes to happen though??

Also look at your .cfg file - is there something there that might be causing it? I'd really like to know what you find out...

FWIW I had a field in my db that just would not work until I changed the field name by one letter...

db is only 21kb, very tiny about 120 records.

i bring it into excel once a month to do a mailmerge so i'll see what happens next time. there haven't been any other problems with the file. the only time have had the problem you describe is when i've added a field to the cfg and forgot to add to db but that hasn't happened in a long time.

i don't know if this helps, but i think i saved the excel file as a text file, tab delimited last month. i noticed in that file that the quotation marks were around any field that had a comma in it. this was the only last name that contained a comma but there were some textarea fields that had commas. but i don't really care what happens in excel; i care about what happens to the online db.

hmm... is there an export to excel mod or do you just cut n paste? I'm wondering if maybe a sub is being called that runs or something. wow that is spooky though...

i run an export to csv/excel mod but it doesn't write to the database. it just creates an external csv file.

figured it out. i had exported file to add a new field. didn't notice that it had put one field in one record in quotes because it contained a comma. so when i uploaded the file, that field still had the quotation marks.