Welll... OK of course everyone's suggestions for using a hash is the perfect one for my project . See (while partially disregarding) my last post. So thinking more in Perl now: The vendor and family lists are born to be hashes. The model list should be a hash whose values are anonymous list references (there are three components to the values) instead of the tortuous tab delimited construct i was considering. So is this syntax correct: %Models = (model1 => ['vendor1',family1,model1html], model2 => ['vendor2',family2,model2html]) and for each $model keys(%Models) ($vendor,$family,$modelhtml) = $model or is it for each @model keys(%Models) ($vendor,$family,$modelhtml) = @model Much cleaner, very beautiful. Allan Greenier AutoScript Applications http://www.geocities.com/~autoscript cat picture http://www.geocities.com/~autoscript/toby.html ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list? ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org