Okay, tilly, you are making me a believer. Armed with Paul DeBois' book MySQL and Perl for the Web and your posts, I'm starting to get it.

The other thing I've been doing is escaping the quotes and apostrophes in strings (like "O'Connell") with $text =~ s/('|")/\\$1/g and it looks like placeholders takes care of all that for me. 1 stone, 2 birds. Thanks.