Thank you so much for your prompt and complete reply, with a working example included. I much appreciate it. I tested your example, and it worked fine. However, when I tried to adapt my code to follow your solution, I was still not seeing the results I had hoped (just couldn't seem to get it to work). I don't understand "map" very well at all, and that may be part of my weakness. Yours seemed like a good solution, and perhaps more proper, but I'll be happy with anything that works. In my case, efficiency is not important, as this is not going to run very often, so anything that works, however kludgy it might be, will suit. (Terrible thing to say, I suppose, but sometimes my time is more valuable than the computer's.)