That's exactly what I'm trying to do, GrandFather and ikegami.

Thanks to both of you for kicking the brain cells into gear, because I suppose I'm trying to do a little bit of both.

I recalled that previous discussions with my boss is that after getting something that parses the file --which we did, just nowhere near as clean as the html::parser-- then try to either skip/strip:
nbsp's
the asterixes '*'
and stop on the line where/when it encounters either "Mean" or a series of "bold" tags.

ikegami, I see what you're saying, but the only educated guess I had was to do something like this in GrandFather's code:

 for (0..$theTable->maxcol())
    {
    my $cellText = $theTable->cell ($row, $_)->as_text ();
    
    
#  Next two lines are for searching and replacing nbsp's with regular
# spaces or evaluate such that if $celltext ='s nbsp or * not 
#to print it   
#   printf("nbsp is \\x{%04X}\n", ord(substr($string, $pos, 1)));
#   printf("nbsp is \\x{%04X}\n", ord(substr($cellText, $row, 1)));
#    s/\x{1234}/ /g;


    print "$cellText ";
    }
[download]

The above is a educated/SWA guess, as I don't have my Perl book handy, but it'd be something like:
if $cellText = nbsp or *, do nothing
elseif print $cellText.

Sound about right?

Gotta go to bed, but many thanks for your helping the noob