You could also use HTML::TokeParser::Simple by Ovid. Given your requirements, here it is a little program that recognizes the body and encodes texts but not tags:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
use HTML::Entities;

use strict;
use warnings;

use vars qw($filename $parser $in_body);

die "usage: $0 <filename>" unless $filename = shift @ARGV;

$parser = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new( $filename );
$in_body = 0;

while ( my $token = $parser->get_token ) {
  if ($in_body) {
    # we are inside BODY
    if ($token->is_text) {
      # it's text, convert it
      print HTML::Entities::encode_entities($token->as_is);
    } else {
      if ($token->is_end_tag( 'body' )) {
        # we've found the end of the BODY
        $in_body = 0;
      }
      print $token->as_is;
    }
  } else {
    if ($token->is_start_tag( 'body' )) {
      # we've found the beginning of the BODY
      $in_body = 1;
    }
    print $token->as_is;
  }
}
[download]

Ciao, Valerio

you might look into HTML::Parser and HTML::TokeParser, then utilize the one or the other to get only the content of the body element and process that further.

On the other hand I'd like to point to the fact that meta tags for keywors and description and title also can and mostly will contain entities or characters that should be replaced with entities to be properly displayed.

Have a nice day
All decision is left to your taste