No, thats the problem I need the nonalphanumeric characters as they are the player names..

Maybe I would be better off by creating flat file db with 2 columns...

"player name" | "numeric index"

Then I could use that to grab the correct name when i want to display the actual name of the player, that would get around the issue of the filesystem not able to handle the odd charcters..
In fact am thinking about using mysql to store the data in anyway, so just might plan in that function...

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Thanks... Simon