OK, ..lets say I do something like this: $hash{$userid} where $userid is a character string. How would I populate this with data elements that would be both numeric and alpha so that when I key in on say "ewh1234" I could pull all or a specific element within the array(?) - e.g., "ewh1234" may contain 'engineer, 23.4, 1.2, local' (4 data items within "ewh1234")? ..thanks