Thanks so much. Now I'm thoroughly confused. Apparently the code I posted grabs the contents of $itemID which includes a number, but is the entire string like something-1234.html. What I really need to do is simply capture the 4 numbers in the string, or 5 numbers if it is a 5 digit numbers. There would be no other numbers in any of the urls. Perhaps there is a better way to achieve this. Can you tell me what each of these lines do? I think the first line takes the query string and sets it to $url. I'm not sure I know what the second line does.

$url=q|$itemID|; 
$url=~/(\d{4})+\.htm/i;
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Here's what I'm doing. I'm using this recipe in the .htaccess file to run a perl script to display a page, but it displays a .html file in the browser.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/getpage.pl?itemID=$1
[download]

So in the script getpage.pl, I grab the $itemID with the code above and turn it into a filename. I search the database for a filename field that includes the page. Sometimes it's 1234.html, other times it's something-something-1234.html. It would really be best to simply grab the 1234 but I don't know how to do that.

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