Thank you for verifying that I can backup the dptr in the way that I described. I was worried that I wasn't taking something into account there (and I did realize afterwards that I would actually have to move the value rather than the address of temp1 and temp2 into dptr....i.e. mov dptr, #temp1

I thought of using the push and pop instructions for the data pointer but for my particular application, that is not feasible. For example, if the first byte is a match, I push dptr and move on to the next byte. If that byte is NOT a match, I just pop the dptr and keep on going. However, if it IS a match, I have a value stuck in the stack that won't get released, which messes up the stack...oh, I guess I could pop it and trash it...but I might need to restore the dptr after passing through 4 bytes and not finding a match.

Again thanks,
..an