Something else that's happening with this, which makes it a Bad Idea (tm) is that when the operator is "or", as it is in my real life scenerio, the 2nd variable occasionally doesn't get populated if the first one returns true. if ($a = "foo" || $b = "bar"){ echo $a."<br />".$b; } Returns foo And even worse, because I have this in a loop, what can happen is that if $b gets populated on one loop, it doesn't get reset for the next one so the data gets seriously bungled. Moral of the story: Don't be so fancy on your first day back after vacation. :) Marc -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php