sorry i hadnt made myself clearer. What i've got is some perl CGI scripts, one of these scripts functions is to display a vertical list of checkboxes that has a corresponding description next to it.
Now this description is actually derived from different places, so when i display the check_boxes, instead of the label being one complete string seperated by a single space, i actually require tabs and multiple spaces in the description.

The code i got for displaying a checkbox_group came from Perl monks CGI help pages. http://www.perlmonks.com/index.pl?node=perlman%3Alib%3ACGI%3A2

From this code it shows that a checkbox_group label is a pointer to an associative array relating the checkbox values to the user-visible labels.

i did try placing a semi colon into my code but now it prints the textboxes as expected as well as the   between each description item

That's because checkbox HTML-escapes its label parameters. You can call checkbox with -label => '' and then put in your string with  's by hand after the checkbox.