I am back to playing with map, trying some new thoughts and will place the working ones here as my other thread is now old and moldy ( and wandered into conjecture). feel free to post your own and play along with my examples, first up: MapAppend for setting values when declaring a Key, and retrieval #include<array.au3> local $mMap[] $mMap['TestCat'] = MapAppend($mMap , 'Entry 1 about Cat') & "|" & MapAppend($mMap , 'Entry 2 about cat') & "|" &