Good grief! HTML::Truncate indeed claims to do what I am trying to reinvent. I will give it a whirl, and hopefully it won't crash and burn.

Update: Yes, HTML::Truncate works on Dreamhost without segfaulting. Problem solved for now.

Many thanks. Wrt Dreamhost, yes, I do have my own lib, and that is where I installed HTML::TokeParser (after finding their version very old). Nevertheless, segfaults abound.