my goal here was to split the body of an article into the first paragraph and the rest, so an advert can be inserted. Since these are html articles, a paragraph is defined by a <p> or <br> tag, and since it's news the end punctuation will either be a period or a double quote.
my $len = length($story->{body});
$len = $len > 800 ? 400 : $len < 150 ? 0 : 150;
($para1,undef,$story) = $story->{body} =~ /(.{$len,}?\.["]?)\W*<(p|br\
+/?)>(.*)/s;