This is pretty cool.

I have never tried HTML::TableExtract but now that I know about it, I'm going to give it a try. I have done something similar for my user stats here: perldev.org, but I use LWP::Simple to grab the page, and HTML::TreeBuilder to strip the html out (then regex's to grab the data I want).

Something else to note is that the perlmonks SETI page has a few table entries that are blank. In the html 'code', you can see they use the ' & n b s p ; ' code for a single space in each case (user #17 and user #80). When I run your code on my Win2k box, I get an 'a' with an inflection symbol (or whatever its called) above it. On my linux box I get a blank entry as you would expect. I mention this just as a head's up in case you didn't notice...

Cool use of the module ++.

djw