#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
my $username = 'dgarcia';
$username =~ s/(\W)/ uc sprintf "%%%02x", ord $1 /eg; # url encode non alpanumerics
my $url     = "http://web.mit.edu/bin/cgicso?query=username%3D$username";
my $page    = get($url);
if ($page =~ /No matches to your query/) {
    warn "User '$username' could not be found!\n";
} else {
    my ($year) = $page =~ m/year:\s*(\d+)/;
    warn "Could not find year for user '$username'\n" unless defined $year;
    print "User $username is in year $year\n";
}