note extremely If you don't need to pad then <tt>$count++</tt> works fine. The trick to this all is that perl's <tt>++</tt> is magical on some strings. Try these: <code> my ($a, $b, $c, $d, $e) = ("aaa", "ab000", "123", "00123", "321ba",); $a++; $b++; $c++; $d++; $e++; print "a=$a\nb=$b\nc=$c\nd=$d\ne=$e\n" </code> You'll notice when you run those that <tt>$e</tt> gets chopped to just numbers. In fact, my stunting isn't really necessary since perl will happily leave the "00" on the front of <tt>$d</tt>! The only trick to it is never treating $d as a number. Look at this: <code> # now that is golfing. perl -e '$a="0035";until("$a">50){print++$a,$/}' </code> Cute huh? Perl is like a squirrel's nest. Good stuff is everywhere but most of it is nuts... Your code could be re-updated to have quotes around <tt>"$String"</tt> in the comparison for the loop and just have <tt>$String++</tt> where the "magical" part was. Sad that I didn't even know how slick it was. My stunt kept the comparison from blasting the string but it is better just to never treat it numerically. -- $you = new YOU; honk() if $you->love(perl) 69912 70222