note Abigail-II As you said, substr is the way to go. <tt>chop</tt> chops off one character, and not more than one. So, if you want to chop off 4 characters using <tt>chop</tt>, you need to <tt>chop</tt> 4 times. Either by duplicating the line, or by using a loop. You might want to bail out if the string is empty: <code> my $i = 4; chop $string while $i -- && length $string; </code> Or <code> my $i = 4; 1 while $i -- && defined chop $string; </code> although the latter might want to chop an empty string (but only once). <p> Abigail 369291 369291