Thanks tachyon. Yeah I guess I'll just do that - I would use CGI::Simple (I don't like CGI.pm much at all), but the code I'm working on was written by someone else and while they don't usually use the html generation parts of CGI.pm, I've seen a smattering of it here and there, so it's not really safe for me to do a drop-in replacement. I don't want to mess around with the internals of CGI.pm - if I do that I'll be even further away from my goal of eventually dropping it altogether.