As chromatic said, you have double-quote-itis. There's no need to quote a variable all by itself when passing it to a function (or printing it, or assigning its value to something else), unless there's deep magic involved.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area)
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;