I think your posting is incomplete... for example

echo '<pre>foo</pre>' | perl -pe 's/<.*?>//g'
# output:
<prefoo</pre
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I think you meant s/<.*?>//g ...

And of course, that is _very_ simplistic ... e.g. cases like:

<select>
  <option selected>foo</option>
  <option>bar</option>
</select>
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and of course (i know, not valid html, but we know it always happens):

<font color="red">2 >= 1</font>
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Personally, my quick & dirty command-line snippet for this is often:

lynx --dump <file|url>
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