This is what you're attempting to do 
#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI();
my $q = CGI->new;
print $q->header, $q->start_html,
    $q->escapeHTML('<><><><><><>'),
    $q->escapeHTML( $q->param('comments'), ''),
    $q->end_html;
__END__
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
         "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-U
+S">
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
+" />
</head>
<body>
&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;
</body>
</html>

[download]
CGI documentation is large, and the distribution comes with lots of examples ,there is even a book on the module.

In reply to Re: Best way to use escapeHTML by Anonymous Monk
in thread Best way to use escapeHTML by Anonymous Monk

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


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