Parsing HTML with regexps is error prone. HTML::Parser, HTML::TreeBuilder, etc are great tools. Here is a short example:

my $str = q{
<span id=editArea name="whatever">
bla bla a bunch of html and text that will change from file to file
</span>
};

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $t = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($str);

foreach ($t->look_down('_tag', 'span')) {
    next if $_->attr('id') ne 'editArea' || $_->attr('name') ne 'whate
+ver';
    $_->delete_content;
    $_->push_content('this is some replacement text');    
}

print $t->as_HTML;
$t->delete;
[download]

gav^