Sounds like you're writing a templating system

Clippy, is that you? ;-)

Seriously though, I'd second the Template Toolkit recommendation. You (the original poster) can use the START_TAG and END_TAG config options to set the start and end tags to "<%" and "%>", then just process the template.

Here is the example from tt2's Config documentation:

    my $template = Template->new({ 
      START_TAG => quotemeta('<+'),
      END_TAG   => quotemeta('+>'),
    });
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