Thanks for all the links! Yes, I already looked a bit at HTML::TreeBuilder but as I understand zilch of it now I wanted to be sure that this is the right tool. The fact that the trees look powerful but with a huge overhead made me ask whether a regex would be faster. The web pages look consistent and a regex to give the number after the second occurence of "drill width:" should do fine.

Using a combination of grep|sed|tr|, each looped over each of the variables and all the files, my crapcode takes about 28hrs right now so everything that makes it faster is welcome.

I would agree that HTML::TreeBuilder looks daunting, but it is not that hard to use once you are used to it. Here is a snippet from a script I wrote recently that uses HTML::TreeBuilder to pull some data out of a table. (Feel free to copy it if you like.)

sub parseResPage
{
    my ( $rawHTML ) = @_;

    my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content( $rawHTML );

    my @tables = $tree->look_down('_tag', 'table');            # We wa
+nt the second table
    my @tableRows = $tables[1]->look_down('_tag', 'tr');    # First ro
+w is headings, then the data
    my $headRow = shift @tableRows;

    my @headings;
    my $res_hash;
    my @cells = $headRow->look_down('_tag', 'td');
    push @headings, $_->as_text() foreach (@cells);

    foreach my $mainRow ( @tableRows )
    {
        my @cells = $mainRow->look_down('_tag', 'td');
        my $iface = $cells[0]->as_text();

        for( my $i=0; $i<scalar@cells; $i++ )
        {
            $res_hash->{$iface}{ $headings[$i] } = $cells[$i]->as_text
+();
        }
    }
    
    # Explicity free the memory consumed by the tree.
    $tree->delete();

    return $res_hash;
}
[download]

Tip: If you are not already familiar with the perl command line debugger then now is the time to learn. When I am working with HTML::TreeBuilder code, my usual approach is to write a script that just loads the tree and sets a break point afterwards, and then start running $tree->look_down() commands interactively until I find a combination that gives me what I am looking for. I then paste that back into my editor and use it in my script.

I suspect that if you write a script that uses HTML::TreeBuilder then it will probably end up being slower than your simple grep based script. HTML::TreeBuilder is well optimised perl written by some clever people, but it contains lots code to handle malformed HTML, and other corner cases, so it will be slower than a simple regular expression based script. Why are you so concerned about speed anyway? How much time have you spent on writing these scripts already?