A better solution would be to use the more current HTML::TreeBuilder: 
my $html = ...
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
$tree->parse($html);
my $text = $tree->as_text();

[download]
For my purposes, the as_text method of HTML::Element was somewhat insufficient, as I wanted to exempt specific tags from having their content added to the text, and I wanted to be able to place a delimiter where tags once where. So, I created my own tree2text subroutine: 
# delim => delimiter to replace stripped tags
# escaped_delim => text to escape delimiter with if present in content
# skip_tags => tags for which content is not added to text,
#   defaults to 'script' and 'style'
#
sub tree2text {
  my ($tree, %options) = @_;
  my $delim     = defined $options{delim} ? $options{delim} : '';
  my $esc_delim = $options{escape_delim};
  my $skip  = $options{skip_tags} || ['script', 'style'];
  my @skip  = map { lc } @$skip;

  my @nodes = ($tree);
  my ($tag, $text);
  $text = '';
  while (@nodes) {
    my $node = shift @nodes;
    if (!defined $node) {
      # move along
    } 
    elsif (!ref $node) {
      $node =~ s/$delim/$esc_delim/g if defined $esc_delim;
      $text .= $delim.$node;
    }
    else {
      $tag = $node->tag;
      next if grep { $tag eq $_ } @skip;
      unshift @nodes, $node->content_list;
    }
  }
  return $text;
}

[download]
You may also find my recent meditation regarding evil spaces to be of value in your endeavour. 
   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

In reply to Re: HTML::Parse by MeowChow
in thread Getting HTML::Parse to work (was: HTML::Parse) by DarkBlue

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