There certainly is more than one way to do it; I latched on print "ASCII value exceeds 127\n" if /[\200-\377]/; which somehow feels more perlish. Amusingly, the easiest way I could think of to generate test data with which to exercise it was another perl invocation; so I ran perl -pe 'y/y/\210/' >foo a b c x y z ^D -Bennett ==== Want to unsubscribe from Fun With Perl? ==== Well, if you insist... Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to ==== fwp-request@technofile.org