in response to your comments and ovid's (thanks alot by the way) i pondered my options, I thought of using the rating as the key and the array as the value (jeffa's post), and using two seperate sync-ed arrays, one holding smaller arrays, the other each arrays rating, but i decided to do something, i think, simpiler, which fit into what i had already coded. I joined the array of characters, and made it the key (and the rating the value), and when i needed to use it i just split it back into an array. A little ugly, but i cant think of a solution i like more. If anyone has any more suggestions, that would be great anyway!