Thank you muchly, the script works perfectly now.

The lines in question now read:

$filename = "$basepath/$basename.html";
open HTML, ">$filename" or die "Couldn't open $filename for output\n";
[download]

However, I still don't know what's up with it not working in the first place. Do you know what the "wierd stuff" or the "confusion" is?

It's nothing important; the script works and I should be able to give a bill to the customer tommorow, but I just don't like not knowning why my code didn't work.