The format features in Perl are really a good thing to go for, even if they look like stone age compared to the politically correct OO stuff in common use today. A good thing to do is to hide the (ugly) interface to the format facility behind your own little wrapper functions.

Another thing might be to do a CPAN search for "format" and look if you can use any of the modules there.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com