Wow! That is so cool! I've always wanted to put in a rownumber variable in there somewhere, but I the approach that I had thought of was by generating a $ROWNUM{$key} variable.

About the namespace littering, that has always been one of my concerns, but I've noticed that it is very hard to be flexible if you don't allow the variables to be "public". You see, one of the reasons why I was never running this sub under strict, was because I had it maintaining a forum, and some of the file headers got dynamically allocated depending on the posters UID, message ID, etc. By using strict, I couldn't flood the process with hashes that I didn't know the name for before hand and that made my code impossible to run. It gets complicated if you know that one of your tables contains a hash of the headers used in other tables.

I've never managed to overcome that, but I would like to (maybe by moving everything out of main::(?)). Maybe someday when I have free time, I'll look into it just for the hell of it. Nowadays I'm using DBMSs, so I don't worry about it that much.

Thanks for the facelift!