note aquarium just throwing it out there..what about re-encoding the sequences as a 5 bit chunk binary, and then you can use binary operations. any faster?<!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-243865"> <div style='color: #ffff00; background-color: #000000'>the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H</div> </div></div> 873068 873068