After doing some more tests I see with smaller files it is faster for me to use the "#" operator that is optimizable rather than the empty() function. This is going to cause me some huge headaches.

The situation I explained in the previous post took over a minute when using the "#" and less than 3 seconds with the empty() function.

However with a smaller file of about 500 records the results are immediate with the "#" and it takes over 7 seconds with empty() function.

Since I have over a 1000 customers using this app that can have varying sizes of files I'm not real sure how to handle this..

Any thoughts or insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,
Paul