This method is extremely flawed. What if you are parsing data that has mathematical equations using the less than or greater than sign? Yes standard html 4.01 transitional should have < and > instead of the actual sign but we all know this will not be the case more times then not.

What if the data has arraws in it (<-- -->)? What if I have my email address in the data as such: <ziationATperlskriptsDOTcom>? Good luck finding a closing tag for that. What if I have some perl code snippets in my data and am assigning STDIN ($var = <> or <STDIN>)? There are many many possiblitites where your code could go tits up and the results would be seriously scewed.