To those who showed me how to access items in a list (put the identifier in quotes, e.g., don't say parms[0], say "parms[0]") - thanks! I think a 'quoting-howto' would be a wonderful thing. Right now I paw through the egroups zope index hoping I'll find an incantation that will show me how to call a particular method (like, why doesn't <dtml-var "_.int(_.time.time())"> work when the time module is right there big as life?) Now I can't get past newlines. I have an input form that uses a couple of textareas where newlines can be inserted. I'm sticking all those form inputs - mostly textboxes, but some textareas - into an mailhost method that calls a SQL method that inserts them into a database. These textarea fields are supposed to go into a 'memo' field in the database that can accept newlines. As long as I put no newlines in the form, the SQL insert goes fine. But if newlines exist, I get parse errors from the SQL interpreter. I can't see exactly what's going to the SQL interpreter because the SQL is not returned. But it's got to be a newlines problem - if there are no newlines in the textarea, there are no parse problems. I tried (in the SQL method) changing the <dtml-sqlvar textitem type=string> to "<dtml-var textitem newlines_to_br>" (adding quotes around the dtml-var to help stringify it) but this made no difference. Anybody figured this out?