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;
}
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