GrandFather's answer is certainly the right way to go, but while we're here, let's look at your regular expression:

  if($line =~ /^\s*<(\w+)>[^\w*|\d*|<]/)

Breaking it down:

^\s*
Anchor the start, zero or more spaces
<(\w+)>
One or more word-characters in <> (so far so good)
[^\w*|\d*|<]
A single character ([..] is a character class) which is not (^) a word character, (\w), an asterisk (*), a pipe (|) or a less-than sign (<). Note that \d is included under \w.

I'm not quite sure what you wanted at the end there, but parens ((...|...)) are probably closer than a character class ([]).

In reply to Re: RegEx Against Arbitrary XML Tags by anneli
in thread RegEx Against Arbitrary XML Tags by onegative

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