wiz,
You sound like you are trying to undertake a fairly LARGE and complex problem for someone at our level. I would recommend shelling out $30 for the llama book. Being new to perl without any prior programming experience, I found this book to be indespensible. While this book has very little "orignal technical" material in it, the way the material is presented has been easy for a blockhead such as me to follow. There are two functions I have found to be invaluable as a newbie:
use strict;
use diagnostics;
 I always used the strict, I just learned about the diagnostics. This produces wonderfully verbose warning/error messages so I at least know where to begin looking for fixes.
Good luck, I admire your ambition as I have yet to try anything that bold since I started playing with perl. %^)

In reply to Re: A monk in training with a problem by scottstef
in thread A monk in training with a problem by wiz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.