Personally, I always try to move punctuation away from quoted commands, and the like. Otherwise I use the normal convention of leaving it inside the quotes. So both are "correct," but the second is what I would do to prevent confusion in this case. Regards, Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '