Not having anywhere near the experience of Ovid, I will offer a different solution. You could use a fairly simple regex to solve your problem, I think. In order to get rid of the HEAD tag and it's contents, try:
$webpage =~ s/<head>.+<\/head>//sgi;
To get rid of the other tags you mentioned, try:
$webpage =~ s/<html>|<\/html>|<body>|<\/body>//sgi;
Keep in mind that this is a very narrow approach and will mis certain things like <body bgcolor="#FFF000">. A modification tothe regex will fix this though:
$webpage =~ s/<body.+>//sgi;
There may be many other anomalies that you may have to take into consideration as well. One thing you can count on: you can't count on two people to format a line the same way.

In reply to Re: Removing selective tags and content between by ChrisR
in thread Removing selective tags and content between by diamich

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.