Hi armenica,

As mentioned above, LWP::Simple will do what you need. But here are a few more tips:

• It's actually spelt 'Perl' not 'PERL'. It may seem pedantic, but people in the Perl community can get a bit irritated if you get this wrong.
• In general, Perl prefers to have less functionality in the 'core', and more in loadable modules, as opposed to PHP, which packs all it's functionality into the core. So for example, in PHP you don't have to do anything special to get a remote URL other than call the function, but in Perl you have a few modules to choose from, one being LWP::Simple. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but it can take a while to get used to this in Perl if you've come from PHP. A good place to find the modules, along with their documentation is search.cpan.org (CPAN is like PEAR in PHP).
• If you have content that you need to URI encode, try URI::Escape (another example of where Perl puts functionality into a module rather than has it in the core as PHP does).
• There are a few places to find Perl's documentation, but one is http://perldoc.perl.org/

Also note that posts on PerlMonks use HTML, so you need to add in linebreaks, etc. It also supports the <code> tags, which make formatting your code much easier. If you wrap your code above in these tags, you'll see what I mean.