Adding the following to my scripts when I was figuring this sort of thing out helped greatly.

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
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To clean it up in general I would do it this way

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
my $value=param('tapas');
print header;
print start_html;
print "Your favorite Tapas place in Barcelona was $value";
print end_html;
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I didn't test that, but it should work. But of course thats just one way. perldoc CGI is also a good source of information.