Yes, I tried it (same for all my other snippets in this thread) and it works, outputting "parse me" as expected.

In fact, that's why I posted some stand-alone code, in the hope that some Monk more knowledgeable than me in the inner workings of HTML::TableExtract would bring you some enlightenment.

As it is, we're probably buried too deeply in this thread for any such luminary to bother reading thus far (not enough XP to be gained :).