Thank you all for your help & suggestions. Unfortunately, none of them helped solving my problem... Below you'll find a few more info on what I'm trying to do, comments on some suggestions and finally some feature requests for future versions of MC.
Basically, I need to sort a variable featuring 5 lines with a max of 30,000 items each. The sort key could be any of the 5 lines, and after sorting I'd like to extract any line of the variable (get line 3 of myVariable) for further processing. The content of every item of every line can change / evolve continuously. When the variable is organized as 30,000 lines of 5 items each, sorting is a snap (less than 1 second), but then extracting 1 column is impossible... ............................ Jacqueline : Thanks for your script : it works great, but when the variable reaches 20,000 items per line, it becomes way too slow... ............................ Ray : Yes, the transpose function looks attracting, but unfortunately it only works on arrays. And once the array has been transposed, it seems impossible to extract 1 single line / row. I tried to put the array content into a variable, but it remains stractured as an array... BTW, when the size of a 2 dimensions array reaches a certain limit (5 rows & 20,000 column), I get the error message : "can't transpose this array" (or something similar), while it works fine with 5 rows and 10,000 colums... Is it a bug ? ............................ Mr X : Yes, 1 of the Rinaldi externals does that perfectly, but doesn't run on Windoze... ............................ Andu and Tariel : Yes, being able to access arrays content via individual rows & columns would be a GREAT feature... I'd even dare to say that future versions of MC should implement most of the properties & functions associated with spreadsheets in OMO, but applied to arrays, which means : - the ability to split arrays vertically & horizontally - the ability to extract individual rows / colums - the ability to sort the content of an array according to sort keys that could be individual rows / colums - a special find function that would work like in OMO spreadsheets : find rows of myTab where item 2 > 10 would return a comma-separated list of numbers of rows for which this condition is true Actually, spreadsheets in OMO where 1 of the greatest tools I've ever used and I still miss them several years later... Of course, this would work on 1 or 2 dimension arrays; for 3 dimension arrays, things get more complex... Cheers, JB _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard