[martian]

This line seems problematic:

  use strict;

Most of the web is messy. Beautiful Soup and its ilk would seem like a better choice for parsing.

[gloob]

Ahem.

http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/lib/strict.html

[martian]

Ouch, should have RTFM. Thanks for the pointer.

[geoscripting]

strict is a standard perl module. HTML::TreeBuilder seems to work just as well with malformed HTML.