Apologies for forgetting to mention that... It's simply a perl console script (no CGI involved etc) which will download the html. I want to use jquery simply to parse the html

I see. How do you fetch the HTML? Does JavaScript populate the values of these checkboxes? Do you have some example HTML you could post?

Update: If possible it may help if you posted the perl code you currently have.

Currently, I haven't written any perl code yet. I'm still in the planning phase. I thought it might be possible to use jQuery.get to grab the page. If not, I can use either a perl module or curl/wget. The html is really not all that exciting. It has a bunch of input checkboxes that are checked manually (via human input). No javascript involved here. After retrieving the html, I was hoping to do something like this:

<form>
  <div>
    <input type="checkbox" name="fruit" value="orange" id="orange">
    <label for="orange">orange</label>
  </div>
  <div>
    <input type="checkbox" name="fruit" value="apple" id="apple">
    <label for="apple">apple</label>
  </div>
  <div>
    <input type="checkbox" name="fruit" value="banana" id="banana">
    <label for="banana">banana</label>
  </div>
  <div id="log"></div>
</form>
 
<script>
$( "input" ).on( "click", function() {
  $( "#log" ).html( $( "input:checked" ).val() + " is checked!" );
});
</script>
[download]

and somehow pull the identifiers of the checkboxes that are checked into a perl data structure. Again, thank you for your help here.