BrowserUK suggested an elegant solution but you've hit two snags.

Parsing HTML is tricky and feature creep!

The following snippet uses an HTML parser to do the heavy lifting. 

#!/bin/perl5

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $html;
{
  local $/;
  $html = <DATA>;
}

my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(\$html);
my ($start, @data);
while (my $t = $p->get_token) {
  $start++, next if $t->is_comment and $t->as_is eq '<!--begin-->';
  last if $t->is_comment and $t->as_is eq '<!--end -->';
  next unless $start;
  if ($t->is_start_tag('b')){
    my $comment = $p->get_trimmed_text('/b');
    my $sig = $p->get_trimmed_text('hr');
    $sig =~ s/\s+-.*//; # crudely strip the timestamp
    push @data, join '|', $sig, $comment;
  }
}

print "$_\n" for @data;

__DATA__
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charse
+t=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>Last Post </TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<!--begin-->
<HR>
<b>Comment 1</b><br>
Doug &lt;<a href="mailto:hun@tele.com">hun@tele.com</a>&gt;<br>
USA - Thu 01/05/2006 - 22:05:51
<hr>

<b>Comment 2</b><br>
J H<br>
Clearwater, FL USA - Wed 01/04/2006 - 02:05:12
<hr>
<!--end -->
</BODY></HTML>

[download]
output: 
---------- Capture Output ----------
> "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" _new.pl

Doug <hun@tele.com> USA|Comment 1
J H Clearwater, FL USA|Comment 2

> Terminated with exit code 0.

[download]

Hope this helps.

In reply to Re: Search function for guestbook history? by wfsp
in thread Search function for guestbook history? by JCHallgren

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.