Thanks Dave, You put a lot of work into your example, and I appreciate it. Sorry, I didn't look at it sooner.
I suspect Dave's approach below (which is what I suspect Scott was suggesting as well, although I misunderstood it) will be fastest. To make it more general, I might have to nest another 'repeat for...' loop to capture cases where the item to compared to in tLargeList is not always located in item 3. For those curious, I'm helping a colleague search through the file pertaining to the human genome database. It's about 80 MB. Regards, Greg Gregory Lypny Associate Professor John Molson School of Business Concordia University _________________________ "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." - Anonymous http://rubbersoul.concordia.ca -- a snip from Dave Cragg's test... repeat for each line tLine in tLargeList if tArray[item 3 of tLine] <> empty then put tArray[item 3 of tLine] & ":" & tLine & cr after tMergeList2 end if end repeat _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard