parsing of SSI scripts.

I have a perl script that outputs HTML data. How would I do to execute that script from within a php-script and have it's output parsed by -apache-. I'm not talking about eval(), but rather have apache parse it to invoke php for whatever code I output. Let's say the perl script outputs: <span class="a">The year is <? print date("Y"); ?></span> Now, if I use system() or shell_exec(), the output is just printed to the page and whatever php code there is is ignored. Is there ANY way to have the output parsed to make the above say "The year is 2002"? -- Sandman[.net]