In a way, “Perl isn’t about Perl ... it’s about the CPAN library.”

Wanna do something?   Odds are certain that thousands of other folks want to do the same thing, and that some of them have written a good CPAN module to do it.   You can also be sure that they have talked about it extensively here, at PerlMonks.   So, whether your assigned task is “HTML Parsing” or something else, “search, and you shall find.”

Only n00b13s try to start on a task by coding it from scratch, given that hundreds of well-tested packages are available for any conceivable purpose.   That simply is not how things are done.