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Given a list of unique strings, how can I generate a list of short, unique integers? I have a list of about 250 unique author/title combinations, such as: Aeschylus / Prometheus Bound Aeschylus / Suppliant Maidens American State / Articles of confederation American State / Declaration of Independence Aquinas / Summa Theologica Aristophanes / Achamians Aristophanes / Clouds Aristophanes / Ecclesiazusae Aristotle / On Generation And Corruption Aristotle / On The Gait Of Animals Aristotle / On The Generation Of Animals ... From each author/title combination I want to create a file name (key). Specifically, I want a file name with the following form: author-firstwordofthetitle-integer.txt Such a scheme will make it (relatively) easy for me to look at the file name and know the what title is and by whom. Using Perl, how can I convert the author/title combination into some sort of integer, checksum, or unique value that is the same every time I run my script? I don't want to have to remember what was used before because I don't want to maintain a list of previously used keys. Should I use some form of the pack function? Should I sum the ASCII values of each character in the author/title combination? -- Eric Morgan