[Ashley Lloyd ]

Chris, Thanks for your email, much appreciated.

I've tried as you suggested, and again I can retrieve the values from within the External Method (if I just return fileID or lines, without actually trying to do anything with them, it works fine), but if I attempt to get at the strings inside the lines variable, it fails.

I think you should check to see what parameters are really getting passed to your external method. You could write them to a file, or return them to zope, something like this - def test(lines): return `lines` In Zope, you can display the return value with <dtml-var "test(lines)"> (assuming of course that Zope knows what "lines" is, which you think you have handled already). If "lines" is truly a list of strings, the display will show that. If it is not, it is no wonder your code is not working right. Let us know the results. Cheers, Tom P