The problem must be somewhere else in your code, because the snippet that I posted works (even though it doesn't print any <area> tags).

Try starting your script with this:

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

Then try running your script through the perl compiler:  perl -c your_script.pl. That should give you a lot more information about possible causes for the errors.

If that doesn't help you out, can you post a bit more code?