Of course you're right about split. My fingers went faster than my brain. I didn't know about the difference between /\s+/ and ' '. In fact Programming Perl seems to indicate that these are equivalent, but checking perldoc I can see that they are not.

Saved 'a lot' of trouble? Really? Did this take that much time? As for others thinking I was authoritative, I thought my posting was phrased in a questioning way. Sometimes replies are for the edification of the replier as well. Any way, I don't know about you but I wouldn't blindly implement solutions posted by random contributors (especially lowly acolytes ;-) without running a couple of test cases first.

Well, I'll continue typing as fast as I can and maybe some day I'll get one right.

Thanks,
Ira

"So... What do all these little arrows mean?"
~unknown