Watch your brackets. Putting brackets around something denotes a function call, or creating a quoted list. Of course, a string is neither, so it throws a fit. To create a list of strings, just provide the strings to the list.
i can get my code to work unless the list (oldblock_lst) is in brackets
im trying all different things to change this to get it to work but nothing is working so far
do you have any suggestions?
Playing out a little more line to make the fishing easier.
Read up on string and list-of-string type data, so you can understand the differences between them and how they look in LISP. Put together some simple foo-examples to work with. That will help with locating the brackets in the correct quatities and locations.