Well, for one think you didn't follow the suggestions by kvale. Also, your loadFile function is wrong. Try this instead:

# this file reads a text file and loads the contents into
# an array
sub loadFile($)
{
    my $self = shift;
    my ($filename) = @_;
    open (FILE, "<$filename") or die("cannot open the file: $filename"
+);
    while (<FILE>) {
        $body .= $_;
    }
    close(FILE);

    return($body);
}
[download]

Update:
Also, your calls to HTML::pageParser are incorrect. They should read:

my $myPage = HTML::pageParser->new($sysLoc);

$myPage->{tokens}{fName} = "Brandon"; #definite problem here, dunno ho
+w to format this
$myPage->{tokens}{lName} = "Smith";   #definite problem here, dunno ho
+w to format this
$data = $myPage->loadAndParse("parseThis.txt");
[download]

See if this makes a difference.