Unless you can guarantee that your HTML is going to really consistent and simple, you're eventually going to run into headaches trying to parse it correctly. Consider that:

<table>
<tr><td>you're likely to see</td>
<tr><td>html done like this</td>
</table>
[download]

I'd suggest checking out a module called HTML-Parser (http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/HTML/HTML-Parser-3.11.tar.gz )

I'd also suggest building an index of key words and which files contain them if you're going to be doing a lot of searching. I had mentioned this once before for a similar type question. The node is Re: Search Algorithm

Hope this helps...

/\/\averick