Thanks for the encouragement. I just starting learning Perl from scratching 2 weeks ago and it has been a reasonably steep learning curve! As you can see I replied to UnderMine and that is the current state of my script after trying all the suggestions. It is still not working but at least now I am getting an error message that I can work on which is preferable to a blank screen! Thanks for the further suggestions and coding tips. I already know that the html is fine though because I checked that out earlier by disregarding the form values and running a really simple query to see if the format of the output was as expected, and it was.