When I saw this question my first reaction was the usual "just use a parser", so I thought I'd knock up something using HTML::Parser. That brought up some problems that I don't think can properly be solved using regular expressions, especially, what do you do if there are nested font tags as can happen (this is what I have the $font++ and $font-- for below).

So this bit of code is a bit longer than I expected but now that I've done it I might as well post. Note it only replaces font tags that have a color attribute, everything else is left as is.

use HTML::Parser ();

my $parser = HTML::Parser->new(
    api_version  => 3,
    start_h      => [\&start_tag,    "tagname, attr, text"],
    text_h       => [\&text_content, "text"],
    end_h        => [\&end_tag,      "tagname, text"],
);

my ( $font, %colored );

sub start_tag {
    my ($tagname, $attr, $text) = @_;
    if ($tagname eq 'font') {
        $font++;
        if (my $color = $attr->{'color'}) {
            print "[color=$color]";
            $colored{$font}++;
            return;
        }
    }
    print $text;
    
}

sub text_content {
    my $text = shift;
    print $text;
}

sub end_tag {
    my ($tagname, $text) = @_;
    if ($tagname ne 'font') {
        print $text;
        return;
    }
    if ($colored{$font}) {
        print "[/color]";
    }
    else {
        print $text;
    }
    $font--;
}


my $html1 = q|<font color="blue"><i><b> <br>Some text</font>,  <br>an 
+a|;
$parser->parse($html1);
$parser->eof;

print "\n\n";

my $html2 = q|<font color="blue"><i><b> <font>breaker</font><br><font 
+color="#ff0000">Some</font> text</font>,  <br>an a|;
$parser->parse($html2);
$parser->eof;
[download]

Output:

[color=blue]<i><b> <br>Some text[/color],  <br>an a

[color=blue]<i><b> <font>breaker</font><br>[color=#ff0000]Some[/color]
+ text[/color],  <br>an a
[download]

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