Hi, Iam reading a text file and greping for certain strings and outputing them to a new file. In the text files there are the following string: apple plum cherry orange I want to match for these words and print them out to a file like this: plum|apple|orange|cherry To do this I need to assign a number to each string and then resort these numbers to resort the string. Creating a two dimensional array I think will do this. --kirk