hello everyone..first off, I am a newb to .net..i had a college class over it about a year ago and I am just starting to get back into it..I am trying to decide the best way to plan a new program I am working on..I will be loading a file into my listbox that looks similar to this: name---age name---age name---age What I want to do is run the list and remove the ---age so I am only left with the name. I am planning to use the split function try and make this happen but am a little unsure of the best way to do this. Here is what I had in mind: count the number of items in the listbox assign a variable for each line use the split function to pull all lines from the listbox and make an array extract only the first value (should be name??) into an output file or seperate listbox? does this sound correct or is there a step i am missing? Also, is there a way to take the age's and add them together before to display in a messagebox before removing them? any help is appriciated