I have a CSV file Some lines look like this a,b," started with spaces, appearing right after the escape block start ",c,d,e I reviewed the spec, and I see that pad characters appear outside of the quotation marks (escape block start/end). What I'm trying to do is remove the whitespace after the escape block start, and before the escape block end. This is just spurious whitespace, appears because some of these CSV files were edited by people. In my data the quoting characters are not always present. They are only there if a comma appears in the data string. Is there a technique for getting rid of the leading/trailing whitespace inside the escape block start/end that I have forgotten? ...mikeb Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Tresys Technology | www.tresys.com Please note: Contributions to the DFDL Workgroup's email discussions are subject to the OGF Intellectual Property Policy <http://www.ogf.org/About/abt_policies.php>