Why? Try typing 'B' as the first character with the following changed line in the code I gave above:

my @dataa = qw/Abberley Abberton Abbotsley Accrington Babraham Bacton 
+Bexhill Bradfield/;
[download]

Notice that the pick list shows only the entries matching the text typed so far. Is there some effect other than that you wish to achieve? Anything else could be mighty confusing for the user!

ok. that works but theres a but. i have a list of approx 16000 place names to populate this listbox with and with that many its quite slow. so i thought i would break it down and have 26 lists (one for each letter of the alphabet) and then load the appropriate one once i knew what the first letter was - Daniel

It passed through my mind that that was what you were after. The following is probably what you want:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Tk;
use Tk::MatchEntry;

my %data = (
    a => [qw/Abberley Abberton Abbotsley Accrington/],
    b => [qw/Babraham Bacton Bexhill Bradfield/]
    );
my $place;
my $mw = MainWindow->new (-title => "i wish this would work",);
$mw->geometry ("200x70+0+0");

my $label = $mw->label ("type somthing in the box");

my $me = $mw->MatchEntry (
    -textvariable   => \$place,
    -choices    => [keys %data],
    -autosort   => 0,
    -fixedwidth => 0,
    -ignorecase => 1,
    -maxheight  => 10,
    -listwidth  => 240,
    -onecmd => \&repopulate,
    )->pack (-side => 'left');

Tk::MainLoop ();


sub repopulate {
    return unless exists $data{lc $place};

    $me->configure (-choices => $data{lc $place});
}
[download]

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