Ok, that was my downfall -- the chr() to turn a 16-bit int (under Win32 Perl) into a 'real' 8-bit byte.

I did initially look at my C books as well as my Perl books to come up with the idea of using a bitfield in my application anyway. Just that I wasn't sure how to deal with it other than through the substr() approach (I've not really used vec() much, if at all, really).

Still, I knew there had to be a simpler way...

Many thanks for all your help, folks... 'tis greatly appreciated.