Yes, the significative replies you got all have to do with Perl and HTML. The question, though, had to do with neither. Actually no perl code is shown nor Perl is mentioned at all, although being here suggests beyond any reasonable doubt that you're using perl to get your data out of the db. OTOH no mention at all is being made of HTML either. People made a reasonable guess, and it turned out to be correct. Due to my cultural backround -or lack of imagination- it was not just as easy for me to get at the same guess. So yes: your question had to do with Perl, but it was about "formatting pure text for display in a web page". Or something that. Wasn't it?