I thought StringIO was also a win. > as the string gets larger the speedup of using a list can be dramatic, even > more than an order of magnitude. Anything more than a few KB for the final > string would probably benefit from the list approach - especially when you > add to the string a character at a time. -- Zolera Systems, Securing web services (XML, SOAP, Signatures, Encryption) http://www.zolera.com