This is exactly what I want to do - I can then pick up various elements of the list and turn them into floats, ints, etc. I have not ever used decode, and will look it up in the docs to better understand it. I can't thank everyone enough for the generous serving of help and guidance - I certainly would not have discovered all this on my own.
Sincerely Thomas Philips -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
