hello, and thanks for your reply. i'm just a perl novice, reading carefully the camel book, and i wanted to exchange portability versus elegance! i'm now tryng to optimize my code and make it work well enough to be satisfied by translating the html subset i more frequently find into pages i look at! soon i will post my results. i'm worried about giving this code to someone who hasn't the HTML::Parser module, and so i use regexp. thanks again, and bye SiG