Perhaps doing something like the following might help:

$peg_nl =~ s/\s+/ /g;
[download]

This will replace all tabs, newlines, carriage returns, and multiple spaces each with a single space (which should make it neater).

Now this might not be desireable if you're intending to deal with plain text because it will mess up any formatting, but HTML isn't supposed to be worried about spacing, so it should be happy (and make your message shorter).

Jacinta