Hi there, I am very new to perl and I am trying to get a search script running. So far it is working as expected however one thing is really bugging me, the search results are sadly full of un-encoded ampersands....yuk, the rest of the site is fully valid XHTML 1.0 strict, so this sort of throws a proverbial spanner in the works. I have managed to kill off some of the ampersands but there are still a couple of illusive ones that my perl knowledge just cant grapple with. This is the output that i get: 
<div><strong>Search results (8 found, 8 shown)</strong><p>
1 - <a href="fcp.pl?words=water+and+fountain&wt=ew&bl=or&amp;d=/link</
+a><br>
2 - <a href="fcp.pl?words=water+and+fountain&wt=ew&bl=or&amp;d=/link</
+a><br>
3 - <a href="fcp.pl?words=water+and+fountain&wt=ew&bl=or&amp;d=/link</
+a><br>
4 - <a href="fcp.pl?words=water+and+fountain&wt=ew&bl=or&amp;d=/link</
+a><br>
5 - <a href="fcp.pl?words=water+and+fountain&wt=ew&bl=or&amp;d=/link</
+a><br>
</div>

[download]
As you can see there is one encoded ampersand in each link but two un-encoded ampersands. The script that is making these ugly little varmints looks like this: (this is just a snippet) 
if(exists $form{'words'})
{ $search_words = $form{'words'};
if($form{'wt'} eq 'be') {$search_wb = ' checked'; $search_ew = '';}
else {$search_wb = ''; $search_ew = ' checked';}
if($form{'bl'} eq 'an') {$search_bAND = ' checked'; $search_bOR = ''; 
+$search_bPHR = '';}
elsif($form{'bl'} eq 'ph') {$search_bAND = ''; $search_bOR = ''; $sear
+ch_bPHR = ' checked';}
else {$search_bAND = ''; $search_bOR = ' checked'; $search_bPHR = '';}
$wl = lc $search_words;
$wl =~ tr/a-z0-9/ /c;
$wl =~ s/(\A\s+)|(\s+\Z)//g;
@words = split /\s+/, $wl;
if($wl eq '' || $#words < 0)
{ $extra = "<font color=red>Please enter some words in the search box.
+</font><br>";
@words = ();
} else
{ $title = join ' ', 'Search results for', @words;
} $search_q = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
$search_q =~ s/\&amp;pg=\d+//;
} else
{ $search_words = '';
$search_wb = ' checked';
$search_ew = '';
$search_bAND = '';
$search_bOR = ' checked';
$search_bPHR = '';

[download]
etc etc.. As far as I can tell the problem is the "$search_bAND" thing. Problem is how do I change "AND" to & ? Any thoughts or suggestions are much appreciated thanks. Humble Regards Nathan.

20041009 Edit by castaway: Changed title from 'New to perl'

In reply to Parsing un-encoded ampersand in XHTML by Anonymous Monk

Title:
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