note tilly Agreed. 22 is the best that I have.<P> For a bit I mistakenly thought I had a 20 char solution in the form of: <code> sub hole{map/^(.*?)\1+\z/s,@_} </code> but the rules say that if a single thing is returned, then it will be in scalar context. In scalar context this solution is wrong (as I indicated in an "oops" update). 84767 84776