Sorry, I left out some of that information. We currently input information through (hummingbird->HostExplorer)3270 terminal emulator on our desktop. If possible I would like to automate the inputs using a perl script.
Ah. It's been a while since I played with Hummingbird, but I seem to recall that it has both VT100 and TN3270 APIs available. Depending on which kind of terminal the mainframe expects to be talking to, you will be able to use the 'native' API-calls to scrape the data into a character string that you can manipulate with Perl.