Aha! That's what tilly had suggested, but without the my %hash; first, and I was getting confused when trying to combine the my and assignment in the same statment! Thanks Fastolfe, I'd not seen that particular usage before :-)

As regards your other reply, currently I'm shifting off the first element of the array, which tells me what the record type is. I then join the array with a delimiter for writing out to a flat file, minus the transaction type (or rather the transaction type get's built into the key I insert with the join).

Pete