I have several strings to analyze. The strings are the names of a list of things that were once ordered and now are not. A typical array of names might look like this: item001 item004 item002 item002b item002C item 5 item 10 itemize this I want to parse these names and determine that "item" is the common prefix. I know how to armstrong my way through it a character at a time, but I'm thinking that Ruby probably has a very elegant way of doing this that I'm not familiar with yet. Thanks, Todd -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.