Depending upon the complexity of the html, you may find that HTML::Scrubber will do what you need:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Slurp qw/read_file/;
use HTML::Scrubber;

my $html = read_file 'text.txt';

my $scrubber = HTML::Scrubber->new();

print $scrubber->scrub($html);
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File::Slurp was only used to read the file's contents into a scalar.

Hope this helps!

#!/usr/bin/perl 

BEGIN {
    $|  = 1;
    $^W = 1;
}

use strict;
use autodie;
use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use HTML::FormatText;

my $html = shift @ARGV;

my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new->parse_file($html);

my $formatter = HTML::FormatText->format_file(
    $html,
    leftmargin  => 0,
    rightmargin => 50,
);
print $formatter;
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Is there an alternative to PRINT or PRINTF that would yield only the ASCII text being shown on the screen?

No, it is not their job to strip html. html2text, HTML::HTML5::ToText

OR, if you have lynx on your system,
you can do like so:

use warnings;
use strict;

  my $filename = $ARGV[0];
  my $ascii = system("lynx -dump $filename");

  print $ascii;
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use warnings;
use strict;

  my $filename = $ARGV[0];
  my $ascii = system("lynx -dump $filename");

  print $ascii;
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Your $ascii variable will contain the return value, a number, from system which is not what you seem to be expecting. Backticks or qx() will return what normally goes to STDOUT.

So, you mean like this?

use CGI;
print CGI::header( "text/html" ),
      CGI::escapeHTML( $data_from_somewhere );
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~Thomas~ 

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."