My favourite solution to problems like these, is to replace those sections of text which you want to skip, by themselves — effectively only doing the real substitutions, in all other sections. Something like this: 
s/(<pre>.*?<\/pre>)|\n/$1 || "<br>\n"/isge;

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This way you'll only replace newlines that aren't in <PRE> sections.

In reply to Re: Substitute within a search by bart
in thread Substitute within a search by Anonymous Monk

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