Another tip: to see what's in a given pickle string, the Python 2.3 module "pickletools" contains a "dis" method that shows a disassembly of the pickle. It uses too many Python 2.3 features to be easily backported to Python 2.2 or 2.1, but you can read the pickle from a file. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)