This is totally overkill for what you want but it's a nice approach for converting HTML to XHTML and that's the subtext of your original question. 

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::LibXML;

my $raw = do { local $/; <DATA> };

my $parser = XML::LibXML->new;
$parser->recover_silently(1);

my $doc = $parser
    ->parse_html_string("<div>$raw</div>");

my $wrapper = [ $doc->findnodes("//body/div") ]->[0];

print $_->serialize(1)
    for $wrapper->childNodes;

exit 0;

__DATA__
All content is in a variable like this...<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.somedomain.com/index.cgi?page=home&var=1&no=2&so=f
+orth&so=on">

[download]

You end up with-

All content is in a variable like this...<br/><br/><a href="http://www.somedomain.com/index.cgi?page=home&amp;var=1&amp;no=2&amp;so=forth&amp;so=on">

In reply to Re: Switching out characters inside links by Your Mother
in thread Switching out characters inside links by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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