Some animals and letters:

table
	1st header			2nd header			3rd header
	subhead1			subhead2			subhead3
	text	more text	some more text	dog	bear	cat	toocan	inu	pes

##

#!/usr/bin/perl

use HTML::TableExtract;
use Text::Table;
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;

my $content = 'table.html';
my $headers = ['subhead1', 'subhead2'];

my $tbl_extr = HTML::TableExtract->new(headers => $headers);
my $tbl_out = Text::Table->new(@$headers);


$tbl_extr->parse_file($content);

my ($table) = $tbl_extr->tables;
my $row;

foreach $row ($table->rows) {
        
        $tbl_out->load($row);
}
print $tbl_out;

##

##

~/www$ ./tblext.pl
subhead1 subhead2
text     dog