True - this does not look much like Perl at all. Since I am writing the whole cgi script with Perl it was a natural reaction to jump to the monks when I hit a stumbling block.
*** woops ***
I don't know anything about the server I am trying to post to * yet *. Here's the deal - This is some large vendor that is expecting a Purchase Order from my server in the form of an XML document. The large vendor is responsible for the documentation that explains how to interact with it and only says, "POST your XML document to our server". I talked to a rep there the other day and no one knows anything about perl, then one CGI guy there says, "oh, you need to encode it with text/xml". He goes on to say that most people use ASP for implimentation....yucchh. So I'm guessing what's happening is that my XML doc is encoded with the default style ('application/x-www-form-urlencoded') and arrives at the server encoded (so the server does not know that it is XML). Oh well - I'll start hitting some HTML boards. thanks.