What Fastolfe says above is dead on. I just want to throw in that you should without a doubt be using CGI.pm for collecting and parsing information from a web form - if I am not mistaken the older edition of the oreilly book fails to mention this very improtant module. Once it gives you the data, then you can go about cleaning it up as you say. When you say 'general form processing' it sounds as if you may be reinventing the largest wheel of them all (CGI.pm), which would be a shame and a waste of your time. You may also want to see the homenode of princepawn for some of the other neat HTML form processing engines. Good luck.

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