in reply to Newbie question, advice appreciated

It seems that an important detail was lost in your post -- it would not have been lost if you had placed "<code>" and "</code>" around your data sample.

Viewing the html source for the page, I see that the data sample really looks like this: 

# STANDARD This is some text that describes
function seventhdoesnotgetenoughsleep

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This clarifies your request quite a lot. Here's a simple solution: 
my %funcs;
my $comment;
while (<>) {
    if ( /^# STANDARD (.*)/ ) {
        $comment = $1;
    }
    elsif ( /^function (\S+)$/ ) {
        $funcs{$1} = $comment;
    }
}

# now layout a nice HTML page that tabulates
# the keys and values of %funcs

print "<HTML> blah blah blah <table><tr><th>Name</th><th>Desc</th></tr
+>\n";

print "<tr><td> $_ </td><td> $funcs{$_} </td></tr>\n" for ( sort keys 
+%funcs );

print "</table> blah blah blah </HTML>\n";

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