Here's a feature I like from Perl's Unicode support: """ Support for interpolating named characters The new \N escape interpolates named characters within strings. For example, "Hi! \N{WHITE SMILING FACE}" evaluates to a string with a unicode smiley face at the end. """ I get really tired of looking up the Unicode character for "ndash" or "right dagger". Does our Unicode database have enough information to make something like this possible? Obviously using the official (English) name is only really helpful for people who speak English, so we should not remove the numeric option. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself "I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can only be cured with gold", Hernan Cortes