If the print is showing that, then that's what the variable is holding, not the  . I'm not sure how to help you, not knowing what module you're using for tokenizing that's mangling your text like that. About the best I can think of would be to make your regexp a lot more accepting.

if($text =~ /Page (?: |\W)+ 1 (?: |\W)+  
             of (?: |\W)+ (\d+)/x)
    {
        print "\n\nNumber of Pages: $areaCode$1\n\n";
    }
[download]

Should work (accepts the literal '&nbsp', or anything else that isn't a word character). The problem doesn't appear to be with your regexp, but with whatever's mangling the html before it gets to your regexp.