Here is the bare bones of what you need to do. You need to escape HTML special. If you want to use something other than <pre> tags you also need to change multiple spaces and tabs into &nbsp; and replace \n with <br>

In this example we wrap the result in <pre> tags to get a fixed width font accurate display of the original text. Tabs are rendered as 4 spaces.

Update

The escapeHTML method this example did use is documented as an internal CGI.pm method so I have re-coded it here as it is naughty to use internal methods. I have also added the PerlMonks square bracket escape. It does not hurt anything.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $text = "c:/text.pl";

open TEXT, $text or die "Oops can't open $text $!";
open HTML, ">$text.htm" or die "Oops can't write $text.htm $!";
print HTML "<pre>\n";
while (<TEXT>) {
    $_ = escapeHTML($_);
    print HTML $_;
}
print HTML "</pre>\n";
close HTML;
close TEXT;

sub escapeHTML {
    local $_ = shift;
    # make the required escapes
    s/&/&amp/g;
    s/"/&quot;/g;
    s/</&lt;/g;
    s/>/&gt;/g;
    # make the whitespace escapes - not required within pre tags
    s/\t/&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;/g;
    s/( {2,})/"&nbsp;" x length $1/eg;
    # make the brower bugfix escapes;
    s/\x8b/&#139;/g;
    s/\x9b/&#155;/g;
    # make the PERL MONKS escapes (if desired)
    s/\[/&#091;/g;
    s/\]/&#093;/g;
    # change newlines to <br> if desired
    # s/\n/<br>/g;
  return $_;
}
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cheers

tachyon

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