since you are a newbie, I permit to suggest something. First as already said, take the habit to use 3 args form for open using lexical filehandles: open my $fh, '<', $file_path or die "Unable to open [$file_path] $!" infact if you use $file_path as variable you can print it also in the die message, using square brackets to be sure you have no typos in it. In addition to $! you might want to print also $^E or last OS error. See them in perlvar

Now about your script: this is not scraping is.. curling ;=)

Scraping the web is a black art, and i'm still a newbie in that but besides basic tasks accomplished via LWP::UserAgent you can use App::scrape (fixed link thanks to kennethk) by our dear brother Corion or Web::Scraper by the genial author of Plack / PSGI Miyagawa.

You can read aboout perl web scraping at my homenode in the scraping link section

L*