My question to you all is can this be done with a fancy regex or is there a module on Cpan that I missed that does this already? If so could you kindly point me in the right direction?

Take a look at this CUFP I posted a while back for some insight on how to parse HTML and extract data from it. In it I use HTML::TableContentParser and LWP::UserAgent to pull in HTML extract data from tables and trigger alarms based on that data.

Similarly you could use HTML::TokeParser to do much the same sorts of things with your <blockquote>...</blockquote> HTML syntax above.

If you have time to do some reading take a look at the book Web, Graphics, & Perl/TK published by O'Reilly or Perl & LWP also published by O'Reilly. The latter being more my favorite on the subjects at hand.