thanks so much, aaron, that got me over the hump. I mistakenly posted on this thread that looked similar to mine, which I was using as a reference. The original node is here: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=963858 . I'd like to clean this up yet by, for example using WWW::Mechanize correctly as well as chomp, but I'll try to solicit comment back on the original.