By the way, in your first piece of code, there is no need to initialize the hash elements to 0. This is Perl ;-)

Thanks, you're right, of course. However, I happen to hate empty if blocks.

Don't worry, it's just a personal thing ;-). So I re-wrote my original code (which I'll probably never use again since it's proved so fragile):

my %totals;
while ( <DATA> ) {
   chomp;
   /(^[a-z].*$)/i or $totals{$1} += $_;
}
[download]

Thanks again for the tip.

dave