First of all, it seems that you're trying to parse HTML. While it seems simple, it's not a good thing to do -- there are too many different ways some random page will break your code.

Instead, use something like HTML::Parser -- it's guaranteed to work better than pretty well anything you can come up with.

Second, when you say that my error checking doesn't work this doesn't help us out much. We like to have a clear description of what tyou were doing, what went wrong, what you thought the right behaviour was supposed to be.

Third, it seems you are in need of some good coding guidelines. Here are a few:

• Indent your code.
• Comment your code.
• Use meaningful variable names.

The recent book Perl Best Practices has some good ideas -- I don't agree with all of them, but it's a good place to start.

ps Welcome to Perlmonks.