4gl "construct" from string?

Is there a way in 4gl to do "construct" on a string? (well, probably -- so, how?) That is, suppose I have a var 's' with "=3" in it, and this is for column name foo, I'd like to be do something like: let q = some_construct_function(s, "foo") and have it return "foo = 3" like a call to construct would if the data were entered on the screen. (Clearly some of these cases are trivial, but I'm more interested in getting it for the parsing of '|' for or, wildcards, etc.) I would imagine 4gl is modular enough that this is just some C function which takes params something like this -- just tell me what it is... (Even if it's not exact, I can easily write a C code wrapper to massage it, just tell me the name & params...) -- Andrew Burt aburt@du.edu "But if he was dying he wouldn't bother to carve "Aaaaargh", he'd just say it."