Fastolfe: about hashes, I did that first, and then realized (or thought) that it would be a mess to transfer the hash into an anonymous array as needed by write_row.

As to your other suggestion, I will try it out. Hmm.. how do you us WriteExcel to give it tabbed data? It comes with a tab2xls.pl file, so I figured you have to use that. I tried just giving it an array, then a filehandle, but that doesn't work. I'll just stick with what I had unless someone knows a better way.

HOWEVER, I figured out what was wrong. Originally to solve the problem where a couple of conditions had a letter missing/one wrong letter, I used regular expressions in the @cats array. So I had a =~ instead of an eq. However, when I changed this to add the substitution I kept the =~ regex bind in, thinking "nothing will go wrong". WELL, HOW WRONG I WAS! It was matching strings I wanted another category to match (i.e., only part of the string matched, but still true result returned). I put an 'eq' there and it works perfectly (well, there's still some bugs I'm chasing down)