hi! I think this is a very smart solution and I figured this is the one I can understand and internalize. Except for one thing: I see that in the first line where youre slicing the message (message = message.slice((num + "").length) ) you are adding a an empty string to the num character. I see that tests fail without this operation. I was wondering how this is affecting the way the string is sliced? e.g. string.slice should take two parameters, both of them numbers, so what does this empty string change? Thanks in advance.