Possibly not the style you wish to go with,

But in such a situation i would use a bare block loop. Mostly i use them when there are multiple loop modifiers that i want to simplify, and this (sort of) fits that description. In any event, it gets rid of extra variables...

# note this is completely untested...
my $match = 0;
my $pb = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$content);
{
  $pb->get_tag('b', '/b');
  my $tb = $pb->get_text();
  if ($tb =~ /^\d+$/) {
    $num = $tb;
    last;
  }
  redo;
}
[download]

something like that maybe,
jynx