Are you trying to do something like HTML::Strip?

When I have to subclass HTML::Parser, I usually go back to one of the simple subclasses such as HTML::LinkExtor. You didn't define any handlers in your code.

The output you see is the parser object. You have to write some code that tells the module what to do. The parse_file() method just tells the parser where to get the input, not what to do with it.