The construction you are using is called a heredoc. Perl treats everything after the <<HTML expression as input until it finds a matching HTML line. "HTML; # blah blah" was NOT a match with "HTML" and was therefore not treated as the terminator. I think it's pretty picky -- even an "invisible" space after the "HTML" could fail the match and I doubt comment "#" will "work" (i.e. be stripped rejected as you thought by the matching) and semicolon is also probably going to fail the match too.

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In reply to Re: Can we use print <<HTML; twice in same file? by anonymized user 468275
in thread [Solved]: Can we use print <<HTML; twice in same file? by Perl300

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