Thanks for pointing me in that direction... definitely a useful module, but my problem still persists. I got as far as HTML::Treebuilder gets me with this code:

# strip html tags
$text     =~ s/<[^>]*>//g;

# strip special chars
$text     =~ s/&[^;]*;//g;

# shove resulting words into an array
my @words = $text =~ /(\w+\'*\w+)/g;
[download]

My problem of being able to find the *exact* instance of a particular word still persists. For example, there might be three occurances of the word, "testy" in a document. The first word might want to be replaced with "test," while the second and third remain "testy." Therefore, I need to treat each word separately.

Also, on my resultant global search and replace, what if someone has included the words "img src" in plain text and they want that changed to "image source"? That would blow up all of my <img src=> tags. I know it's a contrived situation, but I know our users.... I am currently working on this test script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $html = '';
while (<STDIN>) {
        $html .= $_;
}

my $begin = 0;
my $end = 0;
my @excerpts = ();
for (my $i=0;$i<length($html);$i++) {
        if (substr($html,$i,1) eq '>') {
                $begin = $i + 1;
        }

        if ($begin && substr($html,$i,1) eq '<') {
                $end = $i;
        }

        if ($begin && $end) {
                push @excerpts, { begin => $begin, end => $end };
                $begin = 0;
                $end = 0;
        }
}

# last snippet
if ($begin && !$end) {
        push @excerpts, { begin => $begin, end => length($html) };
}
foreach my $excerpt (@excerpts) {
        my $begin       = $excerpt->{begin} || 0;
        my $end         = $excerpt->{end} || 0;
        my $length      = $end - $begin;

        my $word_string = substr($html,$begin,$length);

        ...still working on search and replaces for $word_string...
}
[download]

-Justin

holli has replaced pre tags with code tags