Here is some code for you to study. It uses the advice given by chromatic - chalk it up to another boring Saturday night. :)

Keep in mind that this is not an exact science, there is a bit of art involved - mainly in finding a way to extract the data into the fields you wish to store, without having to write code that is unmaintainable. My solution uses a method that I am not particularly found of - hard coded array indexes, but it works for the example you gave. It will break if the web pages you are parsing tend to change from page to page.

Also, I do not bother with any actual database code, since I do not know what your tables look like.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Parser;

# get the content of the web page
my $content = get("http://www.foobar.com/poopy/data.html");

# instaniate a new parser and let it crunch our data
my @lines;
my $parser = new MyParser;
$parser->parse($content);

# now the data is in @lines - there is more than one way
# to do this - if you know that __EVERY__ web page will
# have the __SAME__ layout, you can hardcode your indexes
# for example, at this point @lines looks like this:
#
#  0 - Location:
#  1 - Northern Africa, bordering the Mediterranean Sea, between Egypt
+ and Tunisia
#  2 - Geographic coordinates:
#  3 - 25 00 N, 17 00 E
#  4 - Map references:
#  5 - Africa
#  6 - Area:
#  7 - total:
#  8 - 1,759,540 sq km
#  9 - land:
# 10 - 1,759,540 sq km
# 11 - water:
# 12 - 0 sq km
# 13 - Area - comparative:
# 14 - slightly larger than Alaska
# 15 - Land boundaries:
# 16 - total:
# 17 - 4,383 km
# 18 - border countries:
# 19 - Algeria 982 km, Chad 1,055 km, Egypt 1,150 km, Niger 354 km, Su
+dan 383 km, Tunisia 459 km
# 20 - Coastline:
# 21 - 1,770 km
#
# so now I can store my variables by accessing the proper index
# in the array: (only the first 5 - you do the rest :)

my ($location, $coords, $refs, $total_area, $land_area);
$location   = $lines[1];
$coords     = $lines[3];
$refs       = $lines[5];
$total_area = $lines[8];
$land_area  = $lines[10];

# not pretty - but it works for the example

# insert into database - you will have to implement
# your own subroutine for this
&insert_row($location, $coords, $refs, $total_area, $land_area);


####################################################################
# package MyParser - inheritance and event-driven programming
# are the things to study if you want to understand how this works
####################################################################
{
    package MyParser;
    use base qw(HTML::Parser);

    # override the text sub to simply store the
    # plain text of the content in a linear fashion
    sub text {
        my ($self, $origtext) = @_;

        # first, any remove leading and trailing white space
        # there are better ways to do this, but it's late *yawn*
        $origtext =~ s/^\s*//;
        $origtext =~ s/(.*)\s*$/$1/;    # forgive me Ovid

        # finally, only store the line if it's not empty
        push(@lines, $origtext) if $origtext =~ m/\w+/;
    }
}
[download]

Jeff

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
F--F--F--F--F--F--F--F--
(the triplet paradiddle)