You've been looking at my old code haven't you.

The

<<SOMETHING;
  some text
SOMETHING
[download]

construct is called a "here document" and Perl borrows it from the Unix shell. Essentially it is a mechanism to create a multiline quoted string. The token to the right of the '<<' is simply a delimiter and will be mirrored by the same token on a line on it's own after the quoted section. The actual token used has no significance whatsoever and can be any valid perl identifier although the convention is to use upper case in order to make it stand out in the source code.

If there are a number of "here documents" in a piece of program code then the developer might get "creative" in order to come up with unique tokens (although this isn't actually necessary it makes it clearer in most code,) thus you can end up with some strange ones like you have seen.

/J\