In your original node you identified the problem as: One of the functions connects to a web page and parses the content

So it dosn't matter if you are an IRC bot, it is still trying to access a web server thru a socket, so you need to deal with the http protocols. This is the most basic ....notice you need to send a Get, or at least a "\n\n", before the web server will respond.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Usage: this_script  192.168.0.1  /~zentara/index.html

use IO::Socket;
unless (@ARGV > 1) { die "usage: $0 host document ..." }
$host = shift(@ARGV);
foreach $document ( @ARGV ) {
    $remote = IO::Socket::INET->new( Proto => "tcp",
    PeerAddr => $host,
    PeerPort => "http(80)",
);
unless ($remote) { die "cannot connect to http daemon on $host" }

$remote->autoflush(1);

print $remote "GET $document HTTP/1.0\n\n";

while ( <$remote> ) { print }
close $remote;
}
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