Thanks for that - I appreciate your comments. I'll confess to being a bit of a map abuser - I tend to use it whenever I need to create a list or hash, although I do try to comment serious abuse whenever possible.

Your QA point is a good one too - I work for a well known and well established website built almost entirely with perl and going through some old code I've found all sorts of mistakes - now I'm trying to import all the millions of lines of bad data it's created into a replacement system.

Most of the mistakes are due to bad assumptions, often using regexps to match parts of strings out, but never testing whether the match was successful and getting a previous value of $1 or something. I sometimes wish that there were much more warnings about that sort of thing.

Have fun,

rdw