note Anonymous Monk Also, unless at some future point you <i>need</i> to walk through and find only entries under a particular nested hash-key, you might consider creating a single string that consists of each of the parts, separated (say) by a vertical-bar character, e.g. <tt>2013|Oct|11th|1AM</tt>, or some other useful-to-you variation on that theme. 1012812 1012812 4