I see the merit in this, but it isn't really applicable in this case. I just made these hashes/keys/values off of what I could think of on the spot. What I am actually dealing with is an array of hashes returned by slurping a .csv file. This leads me to the statement that every field with no data will be a void, "", and every piece of data will correspond to the correct header. I like the thought though, and it certainly would apply in many other cases. Thanks for the response.