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Wow! Thanks i'll look into that and maybe try to adapt it. The strings are of variable length from 1 to 3 characters. What i came up with (bypassing VLOOKUP altogether) was
=CONCATENATE (MID ($J$2, FIND(LEFT (A2,1), $J $3),1),IFERROR(MID($J$2, FIND (MID (A2,2,1), $J $3),1," "),IFERROR (MID ($J $2,FIND (MID (A2,3,1), $J $3,1),1," "))
(I think); which takes each character from the string in A2, gets the position of that character in the string held in J2, then extracts the corresponding character from the string held in J3 and concatenates it to the result. In the case of the string being less than 3 characters, MID () will return an error which will result in " " concatenated instead. Null string would have been better but in my case space works just as well.
Its very cumbersome (and more so because in my actual file the strings J2 and J3 are in fact located on a different sheet); but it does what i need and thats all i demand of it!
Best
Gary