Yes I expected there would be something to switch off xhtml. I tried - use CGI qw/:html4/; but maybe that has more to do with importing methods.

As a third point I forgot to mention a lot of the styling is rendered from css so that negates the use of attributes a bit too.

The real difficulty i am having now that i have extracted the data using the param methods is in relation to placing a textareas' value into a non textarea element such as a regular div and making it format to P or BR at the newline. I've tried mixing cgi methods with arrays and array scalars explicit and sometimes very explict. lol. And trying to regexp substitute P tags with existing carriage returns and newlines but I just cannot get that value to split and format from a predifined newline character(? i saw a ^M at one point if i can figure waht that is maybe im in with a shot). Maybe I have to tr/%daf/pack hex/ as i haven't done that yet.

my $ctp = CGI->new;

my $webmaster = "http\:\/\/www.mysite.com\/";

my @names= $ctp->param;

my @values;
 
 foreach my $name(@names){ 
          
  my $value = $ctp->param($name);
 
  push(@values, $value);

 }

# print "Content-type: text/plain\r\n\r\n";

 my @tone = $ctp->param('tone');
 #print $ctp->p(tone);     
 
my $doob;
#print $ctp->p("@tone");
print "\@tone: @tone\n\n";

if ($tone[0] =~ m/\\n/){ print "[^f]*. globals and carriage returns an
+d zero array value arrays !!\n\n"; }

foreach my $toneadd(@tone){
           if ($toneadd =~ m/\\r\\n/){ print "[^f]*. globals and carri
+age returns!!\n\n"; $toneadd =~ s/\\r\\n/<\/p><p>/;}
           $doob .= $toneadd;              
           print "\$toneadd: $toneadd\n\n"; 
   }
   
    my @tone = $ctp->param('tone');
                   
          foreach my $toneadd(@tone){
           $line .= "<p>$toneadd<\/p>";
          }
           print $line;

print "\$doob: $doob\n\n";

print "<p>$doob<\/p>\n\n";
[download]

Which after another quick & useless debug sesh, I think is shifting me back round to the initial importing through a glob query. Though I can just go and re-open the file again and them in afterwards maybe a good enough workaround even if time consuming.

OR I gotta read some more stuff somewhere....