Hi Paul! The results of these test canot be used in general sense because the results depends on many factors such as moon phase ;) In most cases readability (or the beaty) of code is the perfomance too... * Beggars cannot be choosers >But we can make tests. And in this kind of problems, I never saw one that >is faster when is done in 2 steps. This is why I asked you: to be >It matters a lot. And I agree that sometimes you can/must trade performance >for readability. But this doesn't mean readability = performance.