I've read everything three times, searched the egroups index, and can't find the answer to this simple question. Unfortunately it seems to be a namespace question and it's hard to phrase the question in a searchable way. If I have passed a variable of type list to a method - in this case, it's a mailhost method - how do I access an item of that list? Example: I'm passing the following: parms=['item1','item2','item3'] and the Pythonic way to access an item of this list would be simply parms[0] or parms[1] etc. But when I try <dtml-var parms[0]> I get a KeyError for parms[0]. Doing <dtml-var parms> shows the list all right. I can interate over the list with <dtml-in parms> all right also. But I need to get particular items of the list and cannot figure out how to do that. I tried <dtml-var "_getitem(parms[0],0)"> as hinted at by a howto, but that just gives me a 'slice error; I can't find the magic '_.'?!" set of punctuation marks that will let me simply access list items by index number!