i'm not a huge fan of sprintf, mostly because i always forget the formatting codes.

and so far most of the code has been tied to a CGI object ( not the best solution, but very few projects have needed to be decoupled from it ), so i can get away with:

my $cnt = 1;
foreach my $field ( @fields ) {
   $sth->bind_param( $cnt, $q->param( $field );
   $cnt++;
}
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i'll probably end up poking around more, but since i'm the only developer there, i don't want to blow too much time looking for solutions that don't really result in a gain.