Thank you for that eloquent reminder. I did forget to paste my code. Apologies. Here it is.

  my @bcfHeaders = [qr/Month\s*/,
                   qr/First\s*/,
                   qr/High\s*/,
                   qr/Low\s*/,
                   qr/Sett\s*/,
                   qr/Chg\s*/,
                   qr/Vol\s*/,
                   qr/BWAVE\*\s*/,
                   qr/Prev Vol\s*/,
                   qr/Open\s*Int\s*/];

   my $te = HTML::TableExtract->new( headers => @bcfHeaders,
                                     keep_headers => 1 );
   $te->parse_file($filename);

   my ($ts, $row, $record);
   foreach $ts ($te->tables) {
      foreach $row ($ts->rows) {
         $record = join("\t", @$row);
         print $filehandle $record . "\n";
       }
    }
[download]

Ok, you're creating an array, @bcfHeaders, of one element: an arrayref. That arrayref has a bunch of stuff. Then you pass in the array to HTE's constructor where it expects a reference to an array. Two mistakes do make a right. Sometimes. That probably should be:

  my @bcfHeaders = (qr/Month\s*/,
                   qr/First\s*/,
                   qr/High\s*/,
                   qr/Low\s*/,
                   qr/Sett\s*/,
                   qr/Chg\s*/,
                   qr/Vol\s*/,
                   qr/BWAVE\*\s*/,
                   qr/Prev Vol\s*/,
                   qr/Open\s*Int\s*/);
  my $te = HTML::TableExtract->new( headers => \@bcfHeaders,
                                    keep_headers => 1 );
[download]

or you just change the @bcfHeaders to $bcfHeaders in your original code.

All that said, I'm absolutely confident that this won't solve your real problem. Sorry.