You could also try sending the HTML through the program 'Lynx', a text based Web browser which is installed on most Unix systems. Sometimes you have to write the data to a file and then have lynx open that file with the -dump option, i.e. 
$plaintext = `/path/to/lynx -dump $url`;
I think this will work. (make sure to pass $url through a reg-ex if it can be entered by an unknown user). Lynx does really nice conversion from HTML to plain text.

In reply to Re: Parsing/Extracting Data from HTML. by Anonymous Monk
in thread Parsing/Extracting Data from HTML. by Speedfreak

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