And while we're at it, if you're planning on using this code for an application you need to be robust, I'd recommend using HTML::Parser or a similar module to do the work of extracting information from HTML files. Of course that has little to do with understanding why the regex doesn't work as you thought it would, but it's worth noting.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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