Why do you keep using ->findvalues ? Simply retrieve the nodes or find the text within the nodes explicitly:

/tr/td/text()
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Personally, I simply find the nodes and then use their ->as_text() method to get at their textual content.

I've tried to look at the raw nodes with dumper, and I cant make any sense of it. The document is very complex (see http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=2aafcad88572d98c154ab7d80cbafc02) and as I mentioned, I have zero understanding of xpath. I looked at as_text, but the problem is, I just don't understand xpath format at all, to even attempt to scope my node elements to just that one section I mentioned. If I understood how the nodes were built, I think I could be ok, but to be honest, I just totally don't get this at all. When I do '//tr/td', I get _all_ of the td elements in one giant array, instead of just narrowing the damn thing to the one section I tried to match against in my post. :(

I recommend that you learn XPath.

There are also browser plugins that show you the XPath to a node if you click on its HTML element.

If XPath feels too complex for you to tackle but HTML / CSS selectors feel more accessible to you, you can easily convert most CSS selectors to XPath by using HTML::Selector::XPath.

# get all the tables
my @tables = $tree->findnodes('//table');
# get the first table
my $table = $tables[0];
# get all the rows of first table
my @rows = $table->findnodes('tr');

# loop through the rows
for my $row ( @rows ) {
    # get all the cells
    my @cells = $row->findnodes('td');
    # loop through the cells
    for my $cell ( @cells ) {
        print $cell->as_text, "\n";
    }
}

Output:

Remote Host
Port Number
192.5.5.241
8091
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So, I don't understand why $cell->as_text gives the data, when Dumper \@cells prints a giant ton of garbage. Also, even though I have specified the table element as

my @tables = $tree->findnodes('//table');
my $table = $tables[12];
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I cant reference this directly. Printing @cells[2]->as_text fails outright with "can't call method 'as_text' on an undefined value". It is clearly in there as

my @cells = $row->findnodes('td')
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.... Anything I do to @cells flat out fails except for looking through with the mentioned

for my $cell (@cells)...
print $cell->as_text
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At this junction, I am about to totally give up on this, since I do not understand this at all and have no other way I can parse this otherwise. Since as_text dumps this one entry at a time, I was hoping to process the even elements of @cells as host/ip address and the odd as the previous elements port. But I just don't get this at all.

Note that the HTML block you provide is not valid (missing </td>, and a <tr> instead of </tr>). It would help if you showed us your desired output. It may be better to build up a Perl data structure first and then extract the values you need:

# ... as before
my @aoa;
for my $row ( @rows ) {
    my @cells = $row->findnodes('td');
    my @ary = map { $_->as_text } @cells;
    push( @aoa, \@ary );
}
print Dumper( \@aoa );

print "Headers:\n";
my $headers = shift @aoa;
print "$headers->[0], $headers->[1]\n";

print "Rows:\n";
for my $ary ( @aoa ) {
    print "$headers->[0]: $ary->[0], $headers->[1]: $ary->[1]\n";
}

Output:

$VAR1 = [
          [
            'Remote Host',
            'Port Number'
          ],
          [
            '192.5.5.241',
            '8091'
          ]
        ];

Headers:
Remote Host, Port Number
Rows:
Remote Host: 192.5.5.241, Port Number: 8091
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