Oh great! Thanks for the code u just laid down, I will go through this and see if it works, it look quire promising. The files are in plain text file with about 5000 entries in each, so not too sure how memory sapping this would be. But because I am only looking for the first elements in the column i.e 1021 from :(102l,0,GLU,,11,S,PSIBLAST,206l) do I need a regex to distinguish it e.g /^\d+\w{3}/ ?
Ada