There are some fair points there. To get around the ' (or \) problem I simply replaced the character with a - beforehand, which was a workaround. I have now looked at the DBI docs and have modified my program to be much better in terms or architecture and elegance. I have attached it in case it is of help to someone else :-) Check it out!

#!/usr/bin/perl

use HTML::TableContentParser;
use HTML::Strip;
use DBI;
use strict;
use warnings;

# Connect to database and create parser object
my $db = DBI->connect ("DBI:mysql:newsbms","newsbms", "newsbms",
                    { RaiseError => 1, PrintError => 0});

for my $path( 'modified', 'deleted' )
{
    print "\nProcessing the '$path' entries...\n\n";

    # Create counters
    my $counter = 0;
    my $query_counter = 0;    

    # Open the directory
    my $dirname = "/home/martinn/monitoring/newsBMS/$path/";
    opendir(DIR, $dirname) || die ("Could not open $dirname");

    # Prepare the MySQL statement
    my $query = "INSERT INTO";
    if ($path eq 'modified')
    {
        $query = $query . " modified (id, name, title, duration,
                library, modified, user, rev) VALUES ( 
                ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ? )";
    }
    if ($path eq 'deleted')
    {
        $query = $query . " deleted (name, title, duration,
                deleted, library) VALUES ( 
                ?, ?, ?, ?, ? )";
    }
    $query = $query . " ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE duplicates=duplicates+
+1";
    my $statement = $db->prepare($query);

    # Loop through all files in the directory
    while (defined(my $filename = readdir(DIR)))
    {
        # Skip special "files": '.' and '..'
        next if $filename =~ /^\.\.?$/; 
        $counter++;

        # Open and read the html file into a single string
        open(HTMLFILE, $dirname.$filename) || die ("Couldn't open $fil
+ename");
        binmode HTMLFILE;
        my $html = join("", <HTMLFILE>);
        close(HTMLFILE);

        # Parse the html table
        my $tcp = HTML::TableContentParser->new;
        my $tables = $tcp->parse($html);

        # Issue the MySQL queries
        for my $t (@$tables)
        {
            for my $r (@{ $t->{rows} })
            {
                my @values;
                for my $c (@{ $r->{cells} })
                {
                    # Remove the html tags from the cells
                    my $stripper = HTML::Strip->new();
                    $c->{data} = $stripper->parse($c->{data});
                    # Add cell to the end of the array
                    push(@values, $c->{data});
                }
                $statement->execute(@values);
                $query_counter++;
                # Basic activity monitor
                if ($query_counter % 5000 == 0)
                {
                    print "Issued $query_counter MySQL queries.\n";
                }
            }
        }
    }
    # Close the directory
    closedir(DIR);

    # Finish the MySQL statement
    $statement->finish();

    print "\nDone the '$path' table.\n";
    print "Processed $counter files and issued $query_counter MySQL qu
+eries.\n";
}

# Disconnect from the database
$db->disconnect();

print "\nProgram Finished.\n";
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