Although I haven't done any extensive Perl coding, a friend of mine has and it seemed to involved some unimaginable syntax to pattern search and break strings apart. It was so daunting that it required both of us (I've been programming for 15 years) to decipher it. Maybe he was using a strange variation or API? OH! regular expressions. Regexes. L Yes, regexes are pretty complex, but they are a sublanguage (used by more than Perl, too -- there are C libs for them, VB can use them, etc). And they are immensely powerful. But they are not the only way to deal with strings. There are still substr(), index(), reverse(), and of course eq and ne (string-mode == and !=), and you can easily split them into arrays and operate on them in a very C-like manner (@array = split //, $string). What's so weird about Java. L It's not the weirdness, it's the Java. Java was designed as a language to program home appliances (for instance, coffeemakers). As to using it online -- that was originally sort of a hack. I stand by the words of many Perl, Python, PHP, Shockwave, and other programmers when I assert that I believ Java was a really good idea. Too bad it didn't work. Java has [Peal has] a full (total, complete, more extensive in some areas than Windows) GUI interface (Swing) [Perl: Perl/TK], file handling[Built into Perl], browser API [LWP: lib-www-perl, if you mean acting as a browser. ePerl and PerlScript can act as client side Perl inside a browser], networking protocol APIs [More than you can shake a packet at], wireless API [Yup, several], XML API [Of course], Mail API [Several], Client-Server APIs [Perl can be embedded directly in Apache. Plus there are so many C/S APIs you'd be amazed], embedded systems APIs, telephony APIs, math APIs, graphics APIs, 3D graphics API, and on and on and on and on [...and on and on and on and on and on](there are so many APIs that cover so many areas that it would take several pages to list them - go to the link to see a limited number of available APIs). I doubt very much that Perl has that level of support. Java isn't just for toaster ovens anymore! ;0) Sorry to have to do this, but Perl has a lot more than that B^) The CPAN Archives. See, Perl has modules for almost everything ever under the sun. And it can use C libraries, too though Perl the XS interface. And since Perl is written in C, it uses those natively. Perl has GUI interfaces not only through PTK and tcl, but through a number of other methods depending on your OS. And since it can use C libraries, Perl can use any GUI interface C can. And before long it will be able to read parse Poser files, too. I do have it able to read them into a struct finally. In the next message, I'll post the module thus far. BTW, the main thing is a matter of programmer protocol. Not to scold, but it's generally considered bad form to mention Java in the presence of a Perl hacker (especially to recommend it ever be used anywhere) in much the same way that it's considered bad form to say to a vi user 'why don't you use emacs?' B^)