If the <br> tag is all that is on the line then $line =~ s/^<br>$//i; will kill it. $line =~ s/^\s*<br>\s*$//i; would remove a tag that is only surrounded by whitespace.

If you want to remove a particular tag/sets of tage from the entire document, take a look at HTML::Filter. It would seem to do some quite interesting things.

$japh->{'Caillte'} = $me;