Bengt, Thanks for the input, sorry, your diff threw me the first time I looked at it, but then I went back and tried it later. Yes it works fine and I've tucked it away for later use. For this particular Use Case String.replace seems to get the job done in short order and the tool needs to be maintained by folks not familiar /w Python so I went a head and used that. But, I image I will use this bit of code when I need a finer grained tool.
Thanks again. Cheers, --Alan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list