It's not worth parsing if you just want to remove the tags. The parser may choke on bad HTML, and it may not tell you how long whitespace between attributes is, in case tags have extra whitespace.

Your best bet is to use a non-greedy regex. Off the top of my head:

$str = "<tag>blah</tag> <another>meh</another>";
print "*$str*\n";
$str =~ s/\<(.*?)\>/ " "x(2+length($1)) /eg;
print "*$str*\n";
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For what it's worth, there's also various CPAN modules that strip HTML, but they don't do what you need. And I think it may be more work to use them than to use a regex.

• HTML::Stripper uses HTML::Parser, so I'm not sure how well it would handle bad HTML anyway.
• HTML::TagFilter might be a userful alternative, though I've not tried it. It also uses HTML::Parser though.
• HTML::Sanitizer is another tag filter that may be useful. This one does not seem to use HTML::Parser.
• HTML::Strip does not use the parser, but I don't think it lets you replace text.