I am intrigued greatly by jjohns solution to my problem but i dont't understand when he set up his while loop using

  while(my $line = )

the loop has no condition, won't that give you an error

I guess it was a typo. The proper line would read:

  while(my $line = <READ>)

Maybe jjohn forgot to type the angle brackets as ampersand HTML entities (< and >), he just typed the single characters, and your HTML renderer has considered it was a tag, and an invalide one, and discarded it.