HTML is the markup language used to format the text. Taking it out, you can approximate some things (paragraph breaks, for example), but you can't have bold, italics, tables, etc. ...not in an OS independant way, at least. If formatting isn't an absolute requirement, read on...

As far as removing all HTML, I happen to like HTML::Strip. It's easy to use, and results in pretty readable output. It has a habbit of indenting a lot, but that's easy to strip out too if you want. Here's the synopsis from its POD: 

use HTML::Strip;

my $hs = HTML::Strip->new();

my $clean_text = $hs->parse( $raw_html );
$hs->eof;

[download]

$clean_text now will contain the HTML-free version of $raw_html. It's as easy to use as LWP::Simple.


Dave

In reply to Re: Parsing HTML by davido
in thread Parsing HTML by Gorby

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
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    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
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    < &lt;
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    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.