I don't fully understand what you are trying to accomplish — but that won't keep me from putting in my two cents!

One thing strikes me about the regex and the example HTML text you have provided: the regex
    /bottomPagingCell(.*)bottom/
seems to be trying to match text in the example that seems (depending on how the OP text was rendered and/or mis-typod) to include at least one newline.

The . (dot) regex metacharacter does not normally match newlines. Use the //s regex switch to enable the 'dot-matches-all' (or, more specifically, dot-matches-newline) mode of regex match.

See the section on Modifiers in perlre for more info.