The sed program is only used for this regex substitution:

s/.*Updates.*<span class=\"stats_count numeric\">\\(.*\\<\\/span>.*+/\
+\1/p
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Which could be written in Perl as:

$str =~ s{
    .*?Updates.*?
    <span\s+class\="stats_count\s+numeric">
    (.*?)
    </span>
  }{
    $1
  }xs;
[download]