Check out $string. I use this one to translate special characters from HTML to uniface string. 

$string can convert html entities to a character, but (unfortunately) there's no $unstring functionality to do the opposite (at this moment). You could, however, use (e.g.) a loop like this: for i = 128 to 255   p_html_entities = $replace(p_html_entities, 1, $string($concat("&#", i, ";")), $concat("&#", i, ";"), -1) endfor But maybe Iain was trying to hint at this? This is of course only useful if the html content is not "too big" (otherwise this most likely will have a negative impact on performance). Hope this helps.

No, I'd gotten the wrong conversion, I was thinking from HTML to text not the other way around.    Umm, use a dtd to put the field into XML, and then replace "&#" with "&;#" ? 

Thanks, Iain. I guess that I might misunderstand the problem. Could it be that the forum editor already has done some conversions and the original code looks different? If you want to replace "&" by "&" then assigning the text to a Struct node and then create XML from the Struct (using structToXml) should also do the trick. But again, maybe I'm missing the point here? Sorry.