You can probably clean up your cleanup code a little like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = "<some> text with';*()/? nasty chars. scripted should be ok,
+ but not script";

print cleanup($str);

sub cleanup
{
  $_[0]=~tr|<>;()"'?/*||d;
  $_[0]=~s/\bscript\b//g;
  return $_[0];
}
[download]

Prints:

some text with nasty chars. scripted should be ok, but not
[download]