in reply to Parsing a 100K doc

Now when I wish to present a statistic to the client, I can open up my server side generic svg doc, fill in the array with the desired colors, and spit the result to the client. Does that sound daft?

No. It sounds like you're using a very big template.

So how should I go about filling this array using perl, and then send it to the client?

Look into one of the available templating mechanisms. Text::Template might do what you want.

Also, merlyn has an article onTemplate-Driven File Management that describes some non-obvious ways to use templates.