Thanks Jouke!
I would have spent all day trying to find that out :)
I now understand the object a lot better and have found out that the list of variables stored in the request object is not a hash table at all ... but a STRING!! (this, i'm sure many of you know ... but i'm even more sure that there are many who don't know and may stumble across this one day)

the final code that i wound up using is

    split ('&',$Request->form->Item);
    foreach my $pair (@_) {
        my @temp = split ('=',$pair);
        $form_elements{$temp[0]} = $temp[1];
    }
     
    foreach my $key (keys %form_elements) {
        $Response->write("$key = $form_elements{$key} <br>");
    }
[download]

this code is used in a situation where one has submited data from one form/webpage to the next. Having all of this information in a hash will allow you to carry all that data into the next form without worrying about what the specific KEYES of each of the form elements.

There may be other ways to do this (feel free to chip in) ... but i think this is a pretty good way of doing it :)