Simon P wrote:

Now my problem is, for some reason, in my virtual user table, there are space and tab's, how do I get the split to recognise the tab as well as the space char?

my @fields = split(" ", $_) || split("<ascii for tab?", $_); #

As usual with perl, TMTOWTDI [0]. Your shortest option is below, where the delimiting character for the split is enclosed in forward slashes, $_ is the variable split my default and \s means whitespace (spaces and tabs). BTW, \t means tab. my @fields = split(/\s/); HTH, L. cam.pm.org [0] There's more than one way to do it ;-)