EDIT: The following has been modified to take care of nested tags and DOCTYPE declarations. It should work fairly well now. However, as has been pointed out to me via PM, I probably shouldn't be suggesting regex solutions for a job that modules have already been designed for. You can shoot me now.

--------------

The following may do what you want: 

$_ = join '', <DATA>;
while(s/<(?:\/?\w|!)[^<>]*>/ /sg) {}
s/  +/ /g; s/^ | $//mg;
print;

__DATA__
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "">
Once upon a time there was a <a href="page.html">link</a> and
some <b>bold text</b> and a paragraph break<p>
<!-- invisible <nested tag> -->

and a <table cellspacing="0"
cellpadding="0" border="0"><tr>
<td>table</td>
</tr></table>

4 < 5 > 3

[download]
This doesn't convert things like &nbsp;, of course, but you can add code for that on your own fairly easily. Note that the above mostly preserves page structure - you may want something more like the following if you're just trying to export the text: 
$_ = join '', <DATA>;
while (s/<(?:\/?\w|!)[^<>]*>/ /sg) {}
s/\s+/ /g; s/^ | $//;
print;

[download]

In reply to Re: Stripping HTML tags by TedPride
in thread Stripping HTML tags by Anonymous Monk

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.