Are you absolutely sure that this is true, “in the general case?”
Of course it is not true in the "general case" and nobody ever claimed that.

I understand the question to be a one-off task to move the content of 5000 machine-generated html-files into a database.

That in such a scenario you use all available information to make the task easier is only natural.

In reply to Re^2: HTML-Parser: a newbie question: need to extract exactly line 999 out of 5000 files.. by morgon
in thread HTML-Parser: a newbie question: need to extract exactly line 999 out of 5000 files.. by Perlbeginner1

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