you're quite welcome. The empty space thing sort'a reminds me back in the days of working in BASIC where some implementations always put a space before/after numeric output when doing a PRINT. The only way to work around it was to always convert stuff to strings and manually strip leading spaces. At least it's not as annoying as dealing with "magic cookies" (a "hidden" byte on a display terminal that indicates a display attribute change) on some old CRT terminals (on some terminals you can change display attribute w/o forcing the display of a blank, others show the display attribute change as a blank space).