I'm a little confused here.... Why would the data in the Cookie get decoded for you automatically? Shouldn't you be looking to split on /%7C/ ? Of course that will only help you once you figure out why the Cookie is empty. I'm having a similar perplexing problem accepting cookies using my LWP user agent on Windows, while the same code runs fine on Linux. Perl 5.8 vs. 5.6.1 and I'm about at the point of downgrading to 5.6.1 on the windows box for code compatability. Argh!