Basically I have written two perl modules that print a report presenting urls and the number of hits per url. The first is a text based format, the second prints html. As i used td tags in the html version i did not need to create fields for the url strings, which is when i ran into this problem. As the @ in the url string is treated as text when an eval is done it expects input. Here is a cut down version:

#!/usr/bin/perl

%hash = qw(site.com 10 jamie@site.com:site1.com 4 user@hots:foo.bar 20
+);

eval print_url_info(\%hash,10,"STDOUT");
write;
exit 0;


sub print_url_info
{
    my ($url_data,
        $num_urls,
        $fh)=@_;

    
    my ($format)="",
       ($header)="$num_urls Most Popular URLs :",
       ($local_debug)=$debug,
       ($index)=0;


    ##############
    # Geneate a string to be eval'd containing the most popular x urls
+ for this user


    $format = "format $fh =\n";
    $format = $format . "<!--- Start User Top URLS Section -->\n";

    $format = $format . "<font size=3><u>$header</u></font><br><br>\n"
+;

    
    $format = $format . "<table border=0>\n    <tr>\n";
    $format = $format . "        <th align=left>URL</th>\n";
    $format = $format . "        <th width=10></th>\n";
    $format = $format . "        <th align=left>Num of Hits</th>\n    
+</tr>\n";


    ##############
    # Print the urls in descending order

    $index=0;
    foreach (reverse 
         sort { ${$url_data}{$a} <=> ${$url_data}{$b} } 
         keys %{$url_data} )
    {
        $format = $format . "    <tr>\n";
        $format = $format . "        <td align=left>$_</td>\n";
        $format = $format . "        <td align=right> ${$url_data}{$_}
+ </td>\n    </tr>\n";

        ( ++$index == $num_urls ) && last;
    }

    $format = $format . "</table>\n<br>\n";

    $format = $format . "<!--- End User Top URLS Section -->\n";

    $format = $format . "\n.\n";

    return $format;

}
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I am now using place holders to print the URLs which is ultimately preferrable however I would still like to find out if an @ or a ^ can be treated and printed as normal text in a format.