You are guessing wrong! It is a FAQ and perldoc -q html would have given you answers right away and would have given you plenty of examples of non-trivial HTML that breaks "naive" regexp's.

A search on strip tags on this site also returns a whole bunch of answers. Some of them even make sense: Re: Strip HTML tags use HTML::TreeBuilder, and another one would have lead you to Using HTML::Parser - a quick guide which uses... HTML::Parser.

This would have been fastest than asking here BTW...