You may have an old version of HTML::Parser. As of version 3, you do not have to subclass it to get interesting things to happen.

use HTML::Parser;
my $parser = HTML::Parser::->new(api_version => 3);
$parser->handler(text => sub { print "This is the text: $_[0]" },
                         "text");
$parser->parse($html_to_parse);
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Subclassing can still be done, but there's rarely a reason to do it. This way is much more flexible.

-dlc