At 5:55 PM -0500 11/17/06, deivy petrescu wrote: >On Nov 17, 2006, at 15:54, Paul Berkowitz wrote: > >>Perhaps some of you can help out here, or direct me to somewhere I might >>find an answer, which will probably be in the shell script area. >> > >Paul; >I do not think you need shell. >I believe what I propose is a variation of Emmanuel's method, which >I could not fully remember. Here is the official version, where "tid" is a shortcut for "set AppleScript's text item delimiters to". That's slightly different from Deivy's method, which is excellent also. on IndexOfItem(theItem, theList) set od to tid(return) set theList to return & theList & return tid(od) try -1 + (count paragraphs of (text 1 thru (offset of (return & theItem & return) in theList) of theList)) on error return 0 end try end IndexOfItem Emmanuel