You'll probably need to do a few "sanity checks" as well on the entered URL...as you've noticed, if the user inputs "http://www.test.com", then you'll end up trying to fetch "http://http://www.test.com" if you simply add an "http://" to the beginning without checking it first. A simple way round this would be to strip any "http://" part from the entered string with a regex, but for a more solid approach, check out some of the CPAN modules available (such as CGI::Untaint::url) for this task.

Cheers,
Ben.