Hello Marshall:

I like your solution.. it does way with indices as you say. I copied it to my file and works great.

Now how would you do the same thing if the test_file.txt would be like this..??

1|10
1|20
1|30
1|40
1|50
2|15
2|25
2|35
3|1
3|2
3|3
3|4
3|5
3|6
3|7
3|8
3|9
3|10