There are many ways of addressing this issue. The following is not the best, but it works. I have a form where teachers can enter lesson plans and a series of check boxes represent the appropriate grade levels, K through 12. The checkboxes are named GradeK, Grade1, ... Grade12.

When this data is sent via CGI, the parameter is sent to the script as GradeK=on (or whatever value you set the checkbox at). No checkbox parameter is sent if it's not checked. Therefore, I use the following sub to pull the data:

sub getGrades {
    my $grades;
    my @keys = $template->param;

    # Look for the grade parameters and add each one to $grades
    foreach (@keys) {
        $grades .= $1 . ',' if /^Grade([1-9]|1[0-2]|K)$/;
    }
    $grades =~ s/,$//; # remove trailing comma
    return $grades;
}
[download]

sub storeData {
    my $table = shift;

    my $grades    = getGrades();
    my $standards = getStandards();

    use DBI;
    my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:$database",$user,$password);
    $dbh->{RaiseError} = 1;

    # save template information to database

    my $sql = 'INSERT INTO ' . $table . '(title,  lesson_summary,
                                              grades, standards) 
                                    VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)';
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);

    $sth->execute(
      $template->param('Title'), 
      $template->param('Summary'),
      $grades, 
      $standards
    );
    
    $template->end_html;
    $sth->finish;
    $dbh->disconnect;

    print $template->redirect('http://www.someserver.com/some/path/tha
+nks.html');
}
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

If you use DBIx::Recordset which is built on top of DBI, you can commit form data to database in one line of DBIx::Recordset:

@names = $q->param();
map { $fdat{$_}=$q->param($_} } @names;

DBIx::Recordset->Insert({%connect_dsn,%fdat});
[download]

For more information on DBIx::Recordset, visit: http://perl.apache.org/embperl/index.html