The character is reserved to delimit the anchor part of the URL. Web client must not send the anchor as part of an HTTP request, which is why you don't see it. You can include the character in a URL by encoding it. The encoded value is "%23" (or use URI::Escape to do it on the fly). CGI automatically decodes it in your script.

In a word? No. The # character delimits to the client-side browser where the remote part of the URL stops, and where the anchor to look for starts.

The only way to get that info is to add it before the hash mark, as well as having it after the hash mark:

  <a href="script.pl?first&jumpto=second#second">
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<a href="#second">second</a>
... very long page ... 
<a name="second">Link above should bring the browser here</a>
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Forgot to include that I've tried using %23 in place of the "#" character, but the enocding appears to be interpreted literally, and the the QUERY_STRING print "%23".

I believe I understand the anchor issue .... just trying to find if there's an easy way out that would allow me to include the # character ;) ... laziness as a virtue kinda thing.

Of course %23 appears literally in QUERY_STRING. The recommendation was to use CGI to read your query, and CGI automatically decodes these fields. Doing CGI without using CGI or CGI::Simple is simply asking for problems, and this is probably among the least of those problems.

I guess I'll stick with including the few lines that substitute "#" for an alternate character passed in the Q_S.

Appears I'm at the point of beating a dead horse .... just thought there might be some way to do the deed with even less code or resources.

You don't need to load all of CGI to do this if you are taking the whole QUERY_STRING as a single value. You can use URI:Escape directly. It is an extremely lightweight module. You'll want to use uri_unescape, like so:

    use URI::Escape qw(uri_unescape);
    my $query_string = uri_unescape $ENV{QUERY_STRING};
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Just to note, uri_unescape is functionally:  s/%(\d\d)/chr $1/eg; if you don't even want to load the module.