Here is where your problem lies (reformatted for readability):

foreach $line (@lines)
{
    if($line =~ /test/)
    { 
        $1 =~ s/<p>//gi; 
        print $1;
    }

    if($line =~ /meta/)
    {
        print "$line"
    };
}
[download]

You're looping through all of the lines of content. You test each line to see if it contains the sequence 'test'. If so, you perform a substitution on $1, which contains the first capture of the most recent successful regular expression. Unfortunately, there have been no captures. You print the modified variable, which is doubly-odd, as it's a read-only value. If the line contains the sequence 'meta', you print it with no substitutions.

It's unclear what you're trying to do, unless you just want to strip out opening paragraph tags. That might be:

if ($line =~ /test/)
{
    $line =~ s/<p>//g;
    print $line;
}
[download]

I think you'll have to give an example of what might be in $line before you scrub it and an example of the scrubbed version, though.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.