Ah, I found it...

Upon investigating, I realized that I should not be seeing the xml output, as the browser should hide the < and > tags since they might be html, so I looked at it and sure enough, the brackets returned in the response were encoded: & lt; & gt; for the brackets, so I just did this:

$page2 =~ s/\&lt;/\</g;
$page2 =~ s/\&gt;/\>/g;
[download]

and that fixed it...

Guess I should have looked at the html source of the browser page and I would have seen that straight away.

thanks again. Sorry it was that easy and I bothered you all with it.

Richard