Ken, thank you. The array was being populated somewhere at the beginning of the same code (no subroutines involved). I gave up struggling to understand/handling the delimiters and took a silly way out - I wrote the array into a file and read it back from file into memory - that helped lose my problems and get on with things. Am going to have to look through what I've done and what you've said, carefully (writing and reading back from a file is only a temporary thing that I'll eliminate shortly). Thank you once again.