I'm a big fan of debugging by print statements. When I'm using print statements to see what's in a variable, I'll wrap the variable in some odd characters to see special characters that otherwise might not show up on the screen.

If you change this line:

print "name is $name\n";

to something like this:

print "name is |||$name|||\n";

you'll see tabs, spaces, newlines, etc. at the beginning and end of your variable you might not otherwise notice.

Cheers,

Brent