The kind monks here helped me with a perl program that uses Telnet to connect to a data feed (event stream), that allowed me to parse up the stream and make very nice, before I handed it off to a very delicate program that needs data on a silver platter. So now I am told that a similar event stream process must connect to ME on a port of my choosing, which I must parse up the same way and hand off to the delicate program. Is there an off the shelf way to do this ? Can a kind monk jump start me with some code ? Thanks