note blakem I've been known to [id://125749|rant about uninitialized warnings] before... Here is one nice idiom for "cleaning" a series of undefined values. <code> $_ = '' for grep !defined, ($x,$y,$z); </code> Try the following code with and w/o this clensing line: <code> #!/usr/bin/perl -wT use strict; my ($x,$y,$z) = (undef,'hello',undef); # undef "clensing" idiom $_ = '' for grep !defined, ($x,$y,$z); print "x='$x' y='$y' z='$z'\n"; </code> <P> -Blake 143961 143961