Am not replying to the question you have asked, just adding a suggestion to the code snippet you had posted
There are functions in cgi that does this, for ex:textarea
Here is a sample how you could do that

$cgi>textarea(
                     -name      => $box_name,
                     -rows      => $no_of_rows,
                     -maxlength => $max_length,
                     -cols      => $no_of_cols
             );
[download]

instead of using print statements to print html code directly
this is more readable and maintainable