Aren't you just reinventing the wheel? What's wrong with grandfather's solution, which was shorter -> more maintainable? Hang on a minute, I'm going to see if I can break your parser with some ugly input...

UPDATE: OK, here's something that will break. Let's say there's a comment in your html and the comment has a < or >. This will confuse your parser, because it doesn't check for comments:

So, do like grandfather says and use Treebuilder or one of the HTML::Parser family of modules. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $html = '';
while (<DATA>) {
        $html .= $_;
}

my $begin = 0;
my $end = 0;
my @excerpts = ();
for (my $i=0;$i<length($html);$i++) {
        if (substr($html,$i,1) eq '>') {
                $begin = $i + 1;
        }

        if ($begin && substr($html,$i,1) eq '<') {
                $end = $i;
        }

        if ($begin && $end) {
                push @excerpts, { begin => $begin, end => $end };
                $begin = 0;
                $end = 0;
        }
}

# last snippet
if ($begin && !$end) {
        push @excerpts, { begin => $begin, end => length($html) };
}

my @word_pos_list = ();
foreach my $excerpt (@excerpts) {
        my $begin       = $excerpt->{begin};
        my $end         = $excerpt->{end};
        my $length      = $end - $begin;

        my $word_string = substr($html,$begin,$length);
        while ($word_string =~ m/(\b\w+\b)/g) {
                my $word_begin  = $begin + $-[0];
                my $word_end    = $begin + $+[0];
                my $word_length = $word_end - $word_begin;

                push @word_pos_list, { begin => $word_begin, end => $w
+ord_end, length => $word_length, word => $1 };
        }
}

print "Original HTML:\n";
print "$html\n";
print "**************************************\n";
print "New HTML:\n";

my $test_repl = $word_pos_list[6];
my $repl_beg    = $test_repl->{begin};
my $repl_length = $test_repl->{length};

substr($html,$repl_beg,$repl_length,'POOP');

print $html;

__DATA__
<HTML>
<body poop=smelly>

<p>
This is my text.  I <b>hope</b> you like it!


<table>

<!--  < -->

<tr>
        <td>
        Would you like to see my Monkey?
        </td>
</tr>
</table>


</body>

oh and this too!

[download]

In reply to Re^2: regex for search and replace of words in HTML by tphyahoo
in thread regex for search and replace of words in HTML by jqcoffey

Title:
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