I cant seem to get the replace function to work on my string.

employee=employee.replace("""","")

it still comes out with "Jones, Bob"

instead of Jones, Bob

Why?

Could you fill in a little more context?
when VB shows the contents of a variable as you hover the mouse pointer over it, it adds quote marks at each end in the pop-up display which are not actually contained in the variables data. The same when you post something to the debug window—it gets surrounded by quotes that are not actually part of the data.

I know , It was showing up in the debug window as ""Jones, Bob"".
But I just did a find/replaceAll on the file, and that fixed the problem for now anyways.