thanks again for the help on this. the sort/group syntax is making more and more sense to me as i study it. i've gotten my actual production script 95% complete, but i'm stuck now on how to count the number of <items> inside the hash/array data structure in wol's example.
i need to be able to set some variables outside the inner-most foreach based on the number of <items>. what's the proper syntax to be able to get a count on that inner array from inside the first foreach?