Ovid:

It was the "Running with Scissors" topic that inspired me to add "Sitting calmly with scissors"... I was just being a smartass about my cautious approach to "things unknown" when it comes to Perl (can I say "smartass" here? If not, imagine I typed "wise-crackin' guy" instead of "smartass").

At the advice of yourself and gryng, I'll skip the study() for now and just match the string as is... your reasoning sounds pretty logical. Perhaps in the future I'll add it and try the benchmark module ZZamboni suggested, and see if it does me any good.

As far as the index file goes, I've used that in other scenarios, but it won't work here because these files aren't static... they're ever-changing. I think the overhead of constantly rebuilding the word indexes would outweigh the speedy search advantage. Thanks for tryin to help me out though, man... I appreciate it.

And thanks to Ovid, gryng, and ZZamboni, you guys are the tops!!

Alan "Hot Pastrami" Bellows
-Sitting calmly with scissors-

P.S. Hey Ovid, as a curiosity, the company I work for is called Ovid... I'm a Perl programmer there. Crazy stuff, eh?