Thanks, your help is appreciated, i've managed to print out what I want working using Data::Dumper. I just needed to testing whether a particular hash holds the information I need. You can "smell" homework all you like but it wasnt the case. Why cant it be a newbie getting to grips with programming, who wants to change some existing code he has found? Half of learning to program is not only writing your own code but understanding and altering existing code, is it not?