The situation you refer to has no context of its own -- it is merely list context. To that end, you must call gParam() in scalar context: formval1 => scalar(gParam("formval1")).
Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart