Thanks. Exactly what I needed.

Without going into long explanations of Perl internals, is there a reason this has been implemented as:

use URI::Escape;

$encoded = uri_escape($unsafe_uri);
[download]

instead of as (what seems to me would more intuative (and easier to find))

use URL qw( urlencode );

$encoded = urlencode( $unsafe_uri );
[download]

Or is this a simple case of "Thats the way the author chose to do it"?

Or is this a simple case of "Thats the way the author chose to do it"?

Pretty much. The author of a module can name it whatever they want to. Whether or not CPAN allows them to upload it under that name is a different issue (you can probably find the answer in The CPAN Faq).

As for why the URI module was named URI instead of URL, there is a slight difference between the two. More information on this is available here.