To be honest, if this were a problem I was facing in my job, I would be looking at the workarounds. I'm serious. There's a reason why so many people here are suggesting workarounds: the straight-forward HTML parsing is so painful that we wouldn't want to rewrite it. Even if you have to grab HTML::Parser and bundle it with your app, that's going to be so much easier and more reliable than regexp's... it'll be worth it.