eq does not work with regular expressions, but only for a direct string match :

  my $a = "foo";
  my $b = "bar";
  my $c = ".*";

  print "eq" if ($a eq $a);    # prints "eq"
  print "ne" if ($a ne $b);    # prints "ne"
  print "ne" if ($a ne $a);    # prints nothing
  print "RE" if $a =~ /$c/;    # prints "RE"
  print "RE" if $a =~ /f.*/;    # prints "RE"
[download]

What you maybe wanted was something along these lines (tested :) ):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

  use strict;

  my $filename = $ARGV[0] || "temp.html";

  my $open;

  undef $/;             # undefine all line separators
  open( FILE, $filename ) or die "Couldnīt open $filename : $!\n";
  $open = <FILE>;    # This slurps the whole file into one scalar (ins
+tead of an array)   close FILE;

  # I'll take a simplicistic approach that assumes that
  # the only place where a ">" occurs is at the start of
  # a tag. This does fail when you have for example :
  # <IMG src="less.png" alt="a > b">
  # which is valid HTML from what I know.
  # I also ignore scripts and comment handling.

  while ($open) {
    # Match text followed by a tag into $1 and (if a tag follows exist
+s) $2:
    $open =~ s/^([^<]+)?(<[^>]+>)?//;
    print "Text : $1\n" if $1;
    print "HTML: $2\n" if $2;
  };

  # the real meat of the code is the "s///;" line
  # it works as follows :
  # The two parenthesed parts capture stuff,
  # the first parentheses capture non-tagged text
  # the second parentheses capture text that is
  # within "<" and ">"
  # one or both of the parentheses are allowed to be empty
  # Everything that is found is deleted from the start of
  # the string.
  # repeat as long as there is stuff in the slurped line
[download]

Of course, everything above could maybe be done more correct by using one of the HTML modules, like HTML::Parser - maybe you want to take a look at these modules. takshaka has mentioned a previous discussion of this topic where a working example of usage of HTML::Parser was posted by him - a direct link is here.

For more information about regular expressions read the perlre manpage.

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