I got rid of the error message by changing LIKE to IN and added BEGIN END statements to my RAISERROR messages. I am still having trouble returning zip codes outside...

GSquared,

I did not take offense to what you said. No hard feelings on my end. And yeah I rather learn than get hand fed answers. If I wanted to do...

GSquared,

Thanks for the pointers. I did not think of using varchar but i see why. With the tips I got from you and the other two posts I should have...

rbarryyoung,

Yeah the more i start to reconsider using IF statements the more it makes sense to use them rather than Case. I just did not want to take that route....

Atif,

IF @ipinput LIKE '%' means if value (1,22,abc,bec,c..etc) is 'anything but null' check to see if that 'anything but null' value starts with a 3, 7, or 8. Once i...

ok, thanks for the advice.