Excellent! I normally join using "." and not using join. Admittedly, I did not look up the function and just used it as suggested. Normally I do lookup the functions and the semantics. Thanks for the quick tutorial on mods. I was clearly not thinking clearly. It is much clearer now. I have data pasted into a web form. Each row ends in - and some sort of newline. I tried a number of permutations of stripping the -\r\n. I first expected just \n, but that was not the case. Eventually, I figured out it really was \r\n. The only way to strip those was /\r\n//. Since the dash preceded the \r\n, I tried a number of ways before giving up and making two passes at it. thanks again