Obviously the functionality is very important. But from what I can see, the modules I mentioned in my original post all pretty much do what I need. HTML::Scrubber and HTML::Sanitizer allowing the user to aqdjust his rules on the fly

Don't get me wrong: I like objects, a lot.

It just bugs me when those snappy OO interfaces don't actually contribute expressive power. So, I'm looking for a procedural alternative, that I haven't been able to find on my own.

Why have the overhead of creating and destroying objects to do such a simple thing? Why do I have to type in that extra line of code?

As an analogy, who bothers with the OO interface to Digest::MD5 99% of the time? I for one, am so glad the guy who wrote it lets me get by with md5_hex().