thanks zaxo , i agree with you that i overdid somethings. your code seems to work much better for me . i have another query though . this code that i am posting now is taken from a site for stripping HTML . It does the same thing that my other code was doing , generated empty txt files and gives me "Use of uninitialised variable " error for $plain_text. can any body tell me why??

#!c:/perl/perl.exe
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI ':standard';
use HTML::Parser;

my $plain_text ;
my $p = HTML::Parser->new(text_h => [\&text_rtn, 'text']);


my $path = "c:/perl/htmlfiles";
opendir(LOCAT, $path) or die "Couldn't open folder, $!\n";
my @folder = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir(LOCAT);
closedir (LOCAT);

# Do a loop for each file in the folder. This gets the filename also.
foreach my $file (@folder)
{
    my $full_path = $path.$file;
    print "Reading '$full_path'\n";
    $p->parse_file($full_path);
    $full_path =~ s/html/txt/gi;
    $full_path =~ s/htm/txt/gi;
    print "Writing '$full_path'\n";
    open(WRITE,">$full_path") or die("Cannot create file!");
    print WRITE $plain_text;
    close(WRITE);
}

sub text_rtn {
    foreach (@_) {
    $plain_text .= "$_\n";
    }
}
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