It isn't at all clear to me that your splitting on '&' of $buffer or $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} (and your further decoding) is going to get you the exact data you need. It may...I'm not claiming it definitely won't, but life would be much easier if you use CGI.pm and the "param" method to get the data you need. You won't have to worry about GET or POST methods and the decoding of the encoded data will be done automatically for you. If you are going to use Perl, make use of one of the most useful modules available; you'll be glad you did!
chas