Giving thought to the problem of nested subs I rewrote it as a module and fixed the error. See the new module. And the following is a test script using it. Just enter the table,row,col and it will print out the text. type quit when done.
If anyone else has any suggestions or improvements for the module I would be glad to hear them.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Table;
my $table = Table->new;
my $content = join '', ( <DATA> );
$table->parse_it(\$content);
print "INPUT TABLE,ROW,COL: ";
while (my $inp = <STDIN>){
chomp $inp;
last if $inp eq 'quit';
my ($x,$y,$z) = split ',', $inp;
next unless ($x) && ($y) && ($z);
print $table->[$x][$y][$z],"\n" if $table->[$x][$y][$z];
print "INPUT TABLE,ROW,COL: ";
}
__END__
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<html>
<head><title>tester.html</title></head>
<body>
<h1>tester.html</h1>
<TABLE>
<TR><TD>TABLE 1:ROW 1:COL1</TD><TD>TABLE 1:ROW1:COL2</TD></TR>
<TR><TD><TABLE><TR><TD>TABLE 2:ROW1:COL1</TD></TR></TABLE></TD><TD
+>TABLE 1:ROW2:COL2</TD></TR>
<TR><TD><TABLE><TR><TD><TABLE><TR><TD>TABLE4:ROW1:COL1</TD><TD>TAB
+LE4:ROW1:COL2</TD></TR></TABLE>TABLE3:ROW1:COL1</TD></TR></TABLE></TD
+></TR>
</TABLE>
<TABLE>
<TR><TD>TABLE5:ROW1:COL1</TD><TD>TABLE5:ROW1:COL2</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>TABLE5:ROW2:COL1</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<hr>
</body>
</html>
