Sorry about the last message, one stray keystroke and the spaceship goes to Mars instead of Venus. :-) |>> 1x4==join"",map$_<256,/\G(\d+)(?:\.|\z)/g; |Mine (the 1x4 one) works. No. Try 1.257.1.1.1 |1x4 is no different from 1010101 if you join on |"" instead of 0. The difference is that false and "" are indistinguishable here, but false and 0 aren't. Brian ==== Want to unsubscribe from Fun With Perl? Well, if you insist... ==== Send email to <fwp-request@technofile.org> with message _body_ ==== unsubscribe