To the order, I am having a bit of trouble reading unicode files using while <FILEHANDLE> {}. I have tried using ActiveState Perl 5.005 and 5.8.0 without success. I believe the latter supports unicode but I do not understand in what context. If I open the files in question and save in ANSI\ASCII this resolves the problem but this is not a viable workaround for this application. Any advise/code snippets greatly appreciated. Cheers, mmccar