Hello, I didn't follow very well this thread, so I may be going to say something silly, but... On Nov 20, 2006, at 2:34 AM, Paul Berkowitz wrote: > Thanks, has. This is very helpful. And in this particular case I am > searching through unique items, ASCII only (a list of GUIDs, in > fact), so no > extra manipulations are needed. If this is the case, perhaps the following perl script may be of some interest: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $a = "a, i, u, e, o"; my @a = split (/, */, $a); my %a; my $i = 1; map {$a{$_} = $i; $i++} @a; print &return_indice ("o"); sub return_indice { my $word = shift; exists $a{$word}? return $a{$word}: return 0; } The basic idea is that finding a 'key' value in a hash is very fast; so you would convert your list into a hash. And 'map' is *perhaps* faster than the simple loop. Best regards, Nobumi Iyanaga Tokyo, Japan