Honestly.. The first way you did it is the -safe- way.. I got in a bad habbit of doing it the second way, and I run in to little problems here and there even on PHP4 (or even Perl for that matter) that end up being solved by switching the code to the first way of doing it.. Don't ask me why..

Even in perl I try to: print "hi ", $user, "\n";

I don't know why but I have less problems that way. (not that I run into a problem doing it the second way very often, but when I do it's annoying)

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Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg