Sending Explain output to a perl client

Hi,

I'm trying to tune a query that includes a correlated subquery, by moving the
subquery to a temporary table and joining on that, hoping to improve things by
not executing the subquery for every row. My immediate problem is that since the
temporary table is session specific and I'm running it from perl, I can't paste
the SQL into a psql session to run EXPLAIN on it. Can I treat the EXPLAIN
results like a column from a regular result set and have perl retrieve it like a
regular column value, or is there another way to capture the EXPLAIN output from
a perl client?

Many thanks,

Wes Sheldahl