Hi. I usually do keep everthing aligned in my editor for some reason it kept misaligning when copy and pasting it in to the web browser, hence I added the comments for clarity. Probably should have just re-aligned them.... Thanks for the tip on the different keys within a single array i hadn't thought of that. May actually be easier to restructure my programme that way. Although how to add elements to an array hash based on the outcome of a logical statement is still something I'll want to do. I've looked at some of the PERL documentation and couldn't find and examples of this to clarify. There's plenty on data structure but I couldn't find much on altering arrays within hashes to clarify why this is going wrong. Will attempt to sort it and post again if still struggling.