Yes, that would work (and is what I am doing now in lieu of a better way to tell in the function), but the calling code has to know to initialize the variable and then check it after. While that is always a good idea anyway, I was going for the straight true/false return value where the calling code could be blissfully ignorant of what was going on and just trust the TRUE or FALSE from the function...

Was also intrigued when wondering how one could tell between reference and value, and was hoping for some uber-guru to come up with an elegant trick. *smile*

JoeK