note kitkit201 Thanks for the help guys! That made a lot of sense I am slowly learning syntax for perl. So now my question has evolved to.. I want to compare array hash strings. Specifically I want to do something like this, where i am comparing the $hash{alerts}[0]{status_history}{status} string to a string of them. (The english translation is, I want to compare that status_history,status strings of 1's. If there are at least 6 ones in the front of the arry, do stuff) <code> if ($hash{alerts}[0]{status_history}{status} =~ /1,1,1,1,1,1/) { do cool stuff } </code> Is that correct>? 993116 993116