If you really have no perl clue/experience... you're in four three or four weeks of hard perl learning, followed by three or four hours of not extremely hard programming. Of course, at the end of the day you'll end up as somebody who knows perl, as opposed to somebody who knows how to cut and paste.... If you don't have that kind of time, a hired perl gun may be your next best choice.

As for the issue at hand, I still stand by HTML::Treebuilder - and not only for aesthetical reasons. But regardless, you should know that, when your review cleaning code is ready, you could top everything off by using DBI to stuff them in your SQL database - directly from perl.

Cheers,
alf