I'm not sure I quite got the drift of what you're doing, but from what I understand: You will be reading from a db table the param names to read off from the currently submitted form, perhaps comparing them also. If that's the case, then the db table should contain param_name and param_value columns....it could also be linked via a foreign key to a forms table...anyway, and then you could grep (param_names should have a pattern to grep easily) through %ENV in a loop. If the name is in %ENV then it is defined, and the loop only needs to check for empty '' values. Chris