Yay! Three cheers for fixing stuff! :-)

But your solution is bad Huffman coding. Range objects are much more useful than flipflops, and therefore should get the .. operator.

Either way works for me; I was trying to be charitable to the opposing position. :-) I'll always prefer the solution that lets me keep my favourite syntax (i.e. the range operator), but I didn't know if there were a ton of hidden ex-sed and awk lurkers out there ready to gripe at me if I suggested the range operator be used instead. :-)
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Ytrew