I'm reposting my response, since the question had been originally posted to Perl Monks Discussion

I'm not a seasoned user of HTML::Parser, but I believe it calls a function for each opening and closing tag it encounters, and for each piece of text between tags. If that's the case, you can set special flags when you encounter certain opening tags, and then store all the text in a variable until you encounter the corresponding closing tag, at which point you can store the text wherever you want. Using the HTML::Parser version 2 subclassing, something like this: (untested code, based on sample code from the HTML::Parser documentation)

{
   package MyParser;
   use base 'HTML::Parser';

   sub start {
      my($self, $tagname, $attr, $attrseq, $origtext) = @_;
      if($tagname eq 'blockquote') {
         $capturing{blockquote}=1;
         $text{blockquote}="";
      }
   }

   sub end {
      my($self, $tagname, $origtext) = @_;
      $capturing{blockquote}=0 if $tagname eq 'blockquote';
      # Do whatever you want to do with $text{blockquote}
   }

   sub text {
       my($self, $origtext, $is_cdata) = @_;
       $text{blockquote}.=$origtext if $capturing{blockquote};
   }
}

my $p = MyParser->new;
$p->parse_file("foo.html");
[download]

This will capture all the text between BLOCKQUOTE tags. Of course, you can do more complex rules for capturing what you want and storing it where you want it, but the general idea should be the same.

--ZZamboni