thanks roik for that snippet on escaping metacharacters. i'll give it a whirl.

thanks fletch for that pointer also.
i had heard that a custom library exists for parsing SGML-like text, but am still fairly new to the perl way, and thought i might get away with my approach :)
also, i'm not dealing with plain html- i'm converting scripts with embedded html, so wasn't sure if those parsers would fit for that task.

on a side note, i'm very impressed with the level of feedback and support from the monks
big thanks