You could consider a parser.

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $str = q{<tag ref=1>Start<tag ref=2>and more</tag>and end</tag>};

my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(\$str)
  or die "can't parse str: $!";
  
my @array;
while (my $t = $p->get_token){
  push @array, $t->as_is;
}

print "$_\n" for @array;
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output:

---------- Capture Output ----------
> "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" _new.pl
<tag ref=1>
Start
<tag ref=2>
and more
</tag>
and end
</tag>

> Terminated with exit code 0.
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