Bad guy, no. I don't offend that easily and your comments are in the main valid. I'm a bit embarrased that my first submission to PM went down in flames :) I have a couple of questions on the comments though:

    1. The code referred to uses 'undef $/' to facilitate
       the slurp. I should have included this in the example.
       I take it only fully valid running code should be 
       posted here. I'll do that in future.

    2. Why is binmode dubious ? I agree that ^>* is a much
       better choice for the regex.

    3. Showing my ignorance. What is re 'debug' ?

I totally agree that parsing HTML is tricky and using the modules available is definitely the way to go. I learnt that while using the above code to parse some HTML. My apologies if I didn't make that clear enough.