Thanks. That clears it up nicely. I read the bit about not using printf when print will do, but I did not know to look for ord. I was hoping that by specifying $ca with single quotes, instead of double quotes Perl would not treat $ca as a string. As the other reply hinted, I have been doing C recently, and Perl is not C. Thanks again. pgmer6809

In reply to Re^2: printf x format ? -- solved by pgmer6809
in thread printf x format ? by pgmer6809

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