I catch your point. But if there are so many names that a simple arrayref of names and ids hogs memory, then I doubt the OP will be able to print them out on a downloadable web page regardless of what methods they use. A million, zillion? Thanks, I'd prefer my dropdown menus to be less than 20 items at maximum and the ones that are close to 200 (e.g. country lists) are unweildy. Imagining a select list with 1,000+ names gives me a headache. If there really are that many or more, they would need to be broken into separate pages e.g. alaphabetically with a LIMIT clause or some such. And each of the borken down lists would be easily handled with an arrayref.