Ah Ha! Of course. I guess that I should have thought of that. Anyway, after trying several different separators (',', ' ', '_', '-', '.', '0') and even trying padding with zeroes (01, 02, ..., 08), the only solution that works well is no separator which makes it more difficult when we move to permutations of 10 or more things. Although from blssu's results below it looks as though some of this was fixed in perl 5.8 (I'm still limping along at 5.6.1).

Thanks!
    Dean

If we didn't reinvent the wheel, we wouldn't have rollerblades.

In reply to Re: Re: constructing large hashes by duelafn
in thread constructing large hashes by duelafn

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