Why don't you take a look at HTML::FormatText. It'll strip the HTML formatting, plus it will format the text as it would be formatted in HTML. Pretty nice. From the docs:

     require HTML::TreeBuilder;
     $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new->parse_file("test.html");


     require HTML::FormatText;
     $formatter = HTML::FormatText->new(leftmargin => 0, 
          rightmargin => 50);
     print $formatter->format($tree);
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If you don't want the formatting bits, you might try using HTML::Parser.

In short, parsing HTML is a tricky thing, and it's best to make use of the already-existing code that was written for this purpose.