Thank you everyone who responded :-)

I haven't done much with DBI - just reading through some examples in O'Reilly books, the 'Perl Cookbook' and 'Computer Science and Perl Programming' and the MySql book by Dubois. I do remember seeing the quote function in some of the examples but it did not click that that was causing the problem. I read a question on clpm that the poster wanted some advice and I thought a database might provide a better solution to his problem.

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Chris