For extracting the data from the HMTL files, you should be looking at HTML::Parser or one of it's subclasses (probably HTML::TokeParser).

If you want most of the flexibility of a database but without the iverheads, why not store the data in a set of CSV files and use DBD::CSV to access it.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>