in reply to Got's to be a better way
Have a look at printf and sprintf. They'll take care of your padding. Have a look at this example from perldoc -f sprintf
# Format number with up to 8 leading zeroes $result = sprintf("%08d", $number); [download]
-- Allolex
Perl and Linguistics http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3394 http://www.wall.org/~larry/keynote/keynote.html