Hero Zzyzzx,

HTML::Parser is an annoyingly complex event-driven parser, but it is quite powerful. If you want to strip tags from $html, try something like this:

use HTML::Parser;

our $parser=new HTML::Parser (
    # Call &event_handler on all plaintext, pass plaintext as argument
+ 0 (decodes entities)
    'text_h' => [\&event_handler,'dtext']
);
our $text_buffer='';
$parser->parse($html);

sub event_handler {
    $text_buffer.=$_[0];
}
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chomp; #nom nom nom