[AccessD] Remove Punctuation

Hello everyone!  Greetings from Frigid Iowa.

Access 97.

I need to remove punctuation from a single field in a table which has about
1,500,000 records in it...so far.  It's only 4 columns wide, but fairly
lengthy.

A client has to have all punctuation removed from this particular field,
which is a text field.  I have code which removes the punctuation (as Smith,
Greg W. becomes Smith  Greg W ) but leaves a space in it's place.  Yes, it
gets rid of the punctuation, but for future consistancy (from now on, they
are putting the data in without any punctuation) I can't have the additional
space where the "," or "." was or the search routines will not find every
instance of, for example, "Smith Greg W" because "Smith  Greg W " isn't the
same.

The code I'm using came from M$'s support, and it does work for removing the
characters that I want to remove.  However, if I use "" instead of " ",
nothing gets changed.  It's "ACC: Sample Function to Replace Special
Characters", article #109825.

Is there a better way to do this?  I remember doing this several years ago
when I was first setting up their data, but it's been waaaaay too many moons
since then.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

TIA!

Greg Smith
Weeden1949 at hotmail.com