As far as I know, the lack of a body tag should not keep the browser from renedering the page. Most browsers are pretty forgiving when it comes that kind of stuff. A combination of the lines I showed above could be done as: 
$test =~ s/<head>.+<\/head>|<html>|<\/html>|<body.*?>|<\/body>//sgi;

[download]
I can't see why this would have cleared the entire string but then again, I haven't seen the entire string you are trying to parse. Perhaps you could post a little more...

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

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