I agree with jeffa's point here. If you have something simple, printf will probably suffice, but if you're going with multi-line chunks or full nicely formatted e-mails, Perl's format (perlform) abilities will handle this very nicely. You can have formats that span multiple lines, automatically do word wrapping for you, justification, etc. If you're dealing with plain-text data, there are few things more powerful and flexible for you

It just takes a few minutes to learn.