\_ SMTP quoth Mike Starke on 11/11/2002 16:13 as having spake thusly: \_ \_ I did try David's suggestion to use tr///. Good suggestion in why worry/code \_ against something that may not exists. Out of 9,000 entries, I have 10 bad ones(lines). \_ \_ Ten out of 9,000 lines I can deal with. I once watched someone trying to go through three 80k record delimited files looking for 'bad records' using vgrep. Bad data was at 2-5%. I tossed him a quick perl script and he was thankful. You'd think programmers would think "hey, this is a pita, let's make the computer do it" more often, but sadly, that's not the case. \_ David, BTW CPAN did not have the Magic module. :-) You must guard it \_ closely. It's sort of a self referential module; you can only use Magic; if you already have it. :-) David