May I commend unto you the URI::Escape module.

Update d'oh! posted too soon. Of course you can do w/o that module, just use CGI's version of that method. But the principle is the same

I'd do something like this: assuming you have all the name/value pairs stored in a hash with names as keys and values as values(duh =)

my $query_string;

foreach (keys %nvpairs) {
 # guess which module defines uri_escape =)
 $query_string .= "&" if $query_string;
 $query_string .= "$_=". uri_escape($nvpairs{$_});
}

# assuming $q is a CGI query object ...

print $q->a({href=>"http://www.foo.com?$query_string"}, "click me!");
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Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor