Thanks, Ron. The only reason to do any of this is author convenience (why, in writing a text game, should authors have to look up character codes by number? is the question that motivated me in the first place), so you’re right that it probably isn’t worth pursuing this using the I6 code you mentioned, though it probably would make the folks who mistrust indexed text happier.
Sounds like a cool bit of code, though! Do you write the text to a temporary array and then peel off the first entry?
–Erik