hi monks, many thanks for you advice, I seem to have solved the problem by USEing URI and constructing the query that way instead of concatenating the url string. for info, I got this to work;

use Strict;
use warnings;
use URI;

my $infile = "search_str";
my $savedfile;
my $url = URI->new('http://www.mysite.com/cgi_bin/getthis');
$url->query($infile);
my $status = getstore($url, $savedfile);
[download]

it is based on the helpful o'reilley perl and lwp book which I have just stumbled across!! ;+) thanks