How do I read the HTML of a web page into a character string? Is there some varient of open that specifies a URL?

You need to work on your searching skills. Use LWP::UserAgent. If you want to only get,

use LWP::Simple;
my $page = get 'http://foo.com/';
[download]

Next time, use Google, search.cpan.org and Super Search first, so we can use our time to answer harder questions instead.

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