At first I thought it was because the limit of 1008 bytes per key (though I have no idea how many a-zA-Z characters are in equivelance to a byte) until I did some further testing.

Thats not exactly right. Like the documentation says:

The most important is that the length of a key, plus the length of its associated value, may not exceed 1008 bytes.

Also, unless you're dealing with utf (`perldoc perlio', `perldoc open'), you're dealing with single byte characters.

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.