Hi, I encountered the following problem: <hansl> setobs 12 1960:1 string label = "1960:1" string two = "1960:1 1970:1" string labelintwo = strsplit(two,1) print labelintwo # gives 1960:1 c1 = obsnum(1960:1) print c1 # gives 1 c2 = obsnum(label) print c2 # gives 1 c3 = obsnum(strsplit(two,1)) print c3 # gives NA </hansl> Of course easy to workaround, but since strsplit() is supposed to return a string, shouldn't the last variant also work? And if it doesn't work, shouldn't it throw an error instead? thanks, sven