May I suggest to use HTML::TokeParser::Simple written by Ovid?

# grabbed from man page
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new( $somefile );
while ( my $token = $p->get_token ) {
  # This prints all text in an HTML doc (i.e., it strips the HTML)
  next unless $token->is_text;
  print $token->as_is;
}
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Ciao, Valerio

Here's an old sub I have that does that, with a flag to optionally remove newlines.

sub text_only
{
    my $content     = shift;
    my $rm_newlines = shift;
    my $parser;
    my %inside;
    my $text;

    my $tag = sub
    {
        my ($tag_name, $num) = @_;
        $inside{$tag_name} += $num;
        $text .= " ";
    };

    my $get_text = sub
    {
        $text .= $_[0] if ( !$inside{script} && !$inside{style} );
    };

    $parser = HTML::Parser->new(handlers => [start => [$tag, "tagname,
+ '+1'"],
                                             end   => [$tag, "tagname,
+ '-1'"],
                                             text  => [$get_text, "dte
+xt"],
                                            ],
                                marked_sections => 1) or die
        croak "Failed to create HTML::Parser object: $!\n";

    $parser->parse($content);

    $text =~ s/[\n\r]/ /g if ($rm_newlines);

    return $text;
}
[download]

That task seems like it might be handled better with a more specific tool than HTML::Parser.

Both HTML::TagFilter and HTML::CGIChecker offer fuctions for removing unwanted HTML tags, and offer simple ways to allow certain safe tags to filter through if you want that.

The above answers are excellent, but if you are looking to present this text in a clean formatted way, you might want to look at some of the html2txt programs that are floating around on the internet. Debian has one prepackaged that I have used and works quite well.

Of course this is useless if you just want the data, and don't care about the formatting.

use LWP::Simple qw($ua get head);
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $webpage = "http://some-url.com";
$ua->timeout(30);

my ($html, $parsed_html);
if (head($webpage)) {
    $html = get $webpage || return 0;
}   else { return 0; }

my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new( \$html );

  while ( my $token = $p->get_token ) {
    next unless $token->is_text;
    $parsed_html .= $token->as_is;
  }
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