Some introductory reading...

• How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
• How (Not) To Ask A Question
• How to RTFM

Also,you should consider a templating system such as HTML::Template (or at very least some heredocs).

Update:

this is inputted from a form

Are you using CGI.pm to parse the input? I assume you have taint mode enabled and are checking all the parameters (especially ones like $surveyoffice_base_dir), right? If not, read this.

Another Update: reading up on s/// might help you out a bit as well. Please look into the above suggestions first though, they are very important.

Is there a way I can replace the underscore chars with white spaces

y -_- -
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This code may work, but not reliably -- it depends on your background colour. For comparison,

y -_- -

will never work (on most browsers), as it will tend to generate pinkspace. Of course, Unicode probably has 4 different solutions for you (although 2 will not work for Japanese and the other 2 fail for Arabic). Perl supports Unicode, so you should have no problems in that regard.

I suspect, however, that this is an inherent problem; Perl cannot help you here.

How embarassed will you be if your script allows someone to crack the machine and use it as a kidporn or war3z trading server?

Anyhow, just so you can fix your current "URGTENT" urgent problem (and right after that, read the links provided by the good monks).

$variable =~ s/_/ /g;
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Hi thanks for your help. I didnt write the survey script, Im only trying to hack it for aesthetics sake. My client didnt like how the title looked with _ chars in it. Anyway I added the code you suggested ( I use seach and replace every day thru command line for line breaks etc ) so maybe I didnt explain myself correctly, I knew how to do the replace just wasnt sure of the structure for it. Again thanks and heres what I added

$String = "$survey"; 
$String =~ s/_/ /g;
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then called $string instead of $survey in the html title simple huh?? see you around and thanks for everyone who posted. p.s. when the boss gives me a few minutes to breath Ill read the links as suggested. Mark R

You're welcome... it's good to see people learn, to be honest i often have to look up the most basic things myself.

One minor hint:
When you want to assign the value of one variable to another, you needn't quote the original variable.

Hence,

$String = "$survey";
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is actually better written as:

$String = $survey;
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Perl is flexible enough to live with the first version, but that ability was really meant more for things like this:

if ($something) {
    # do some stuff
}
else {
    # there was an error, set it
    $error = "informative error message";
    $error_num = 45;
}

print STDERR "Error $error_num    $error";
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This will (if there was an error, ie $something was not true) produce:
Error 45    informative error message on the STDERR output (or in a logfile, or wherever you printed the error)

In any case, please do take a look at those other links in this thread, if you read/heed them, you'll actually get better answers much more quickly at this site.

have a great day!