Well, it's very tantalizing .. you got an illegal value error .. yes .. yes .. but where? On which line of your script? (And don't say line 17 or we'll smack you -- tell us which statement it had problems with.)

Have you tried single stepping through the script with the debugger, or does this finely crafted piece of code compile cleanly?

I'm curious about the syntax:

$agent->get(my $url="http:.....");
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The embedded my? Yes it's perfectly valid, although I quite agree that it looks odd, but the simple fact of the matter is that lexicals can be created pretty much anywhere in a statement.

It's (I think) what lets you do:

    if( my $foo = bar(@quux) ) {
        $foo exists here
    }
    # no foo here
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I'm certain it's what lets you say:

    (my $copy = $original) =~ s/foo/bar/;
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That is, the variable $copy doesn't fall out of scope outside the parentheses. Sometimes it makes for nicer code, sometimes bizarre. Be wary of trying this new toy out everywhere :)

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

This is a partial example of what I did to pull names and addresses from yellowpages.com:

use WWW::Mechanize;

my ($name, $city, $state);

my $url      = 'http://www.yellowpages.com/Index.aspx';
my $mech     = WWW::Mechanize->new(autocheck => 1);

$mech->get( $url );
$mech->form_name("__aspnetForm");
$mech->field("Mainhomectrl2:BasicForm1:businessname", $name);
$mech->field("Mainhomectrl2:BasicForm1:city", $city);
$mech->field("Mainhomectrl2:BasicForm1:state", $state);
$mech->click("Mainhomectrl2:BasicForm1:searchbtn");
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I think you need to add $agent->form_name("post") to your code. I just tried it and it didn't throw an error when I added that to your code.

HTH!