I'm still puzzling over this suggestion. I understand the "next if" part well enough, but the dropping of my counters? I'm using the counters as part of the logic to tell me if the line has matched after all the columns have been checked (I don't know until then). It seems to my mind, and perhaps I am just slow of understanding, that the "next if" cannot be applied to all columns at once. Hence the counters.

But if there were some way of adding the count at the same time as checking for a match, in one-liner fashion, that might be workable.