The <br> character is undoubtedly at the end of each line in your OUTFILE. You are printing into FINAL exactly whatever was read from OUTFILE. If you don't want the <br> at the end of each line then you have to explicitly remove it right after you read each line from OUTFILE. For example, if each line in OUTFILE has a line return at the end, then you would normally chomp($_) in your while... block before you do the print tests.