I have been programming in Perl for a few years now but still consider myself a "Perl newbie".

Please excuse my assumption that this was your first foray into Perl programming then. It just seemed that way to me because you supplied us with five examples of things you tried, none of which made much sense even when you disregard the fact that they were presumably assignments to variables which weren't prefixed with a sigil ($, @, or %).

I see that BrowserUk was seemingly able to interpret your problem and provide a solution though. I'm glad you got help.

If I've learned one thing programming it is that eventually you have to ask for help.

Of course!

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";