Wait... I lied. The way I was running it was fooling me. > set thePattern to "\\|" & channelID & "\\||" The doubled pipe is the problem. Your pattern ends with '|', which means "or"... nothing. So it will match every line that contains the empty string, which is every line. Undouble that pipe and you're good to go. -- Mark J. Reed <[log in to unmask]>