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);
[download]

File::Slurp was only used to read the file's contents into a scalar.

Hope this helps!