Spreadsheet::WriteExcel does not know anything about (SQL) queries. There is something else that runs the SQL query on your server and then hands over the query results to Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. Whatever that part does, you have not shown us its code, and maybe there is where (part of) the problem is.

Thanks Corion. That is good to know. I'll zero in on the perl code then.

Hi Monks, just wanted to follow up with what i did to get this to finally work. I don't really understand why i had to do it, but maybe one of the Monks will.

The issue is that in an Oracle client (TOAD for example) the following col of a select statement worked, but within perl using DBI it did not. Ultimately, i had to escape the backslash character....so \W+...became....\\W+

From:

regexp_substr(SDSM2.MSG_BODY,'(:16R:ACCTINFO)\W+(:95[[:alnum:]]*)*\W+:
+97A::SAFE//'||SDSM1.ACT_N||'(.+?):16S:ACCTINFO',1,1,'n') as accnt_inf
+o,
[download]

To:

regexp_substr(SDSM2.MSG_BODY,'(:16R:ACCTINFO)\\W+(:95[[:alnum:]]*)*\\W
++:97A::SAFE//'||SDSM1.ACT_N||'(.+?):16S:ACCTINFO',1,1,'n') as accnt_i
+nfo,
[download]

After making that change it worked inside perl.

thanks for the help!