i suppose I should suggest this:

use HTML::TagFilter;
my $tf = new HTML::TagFilter;
...
$tf->allow_tags({});
my $text = $tf->filter($html);
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which does exactly the same as the other parser-based solutions, but by way of a subclass that hides much of the unpleasantness. It mght be worth a look if you think you'll want to strip html selectively later on, but otherwise i'd stick with one of the more direct methods described above.