Ok, well after polishing of my primary regular expression and really getting into the "meat" of my app I relized I was faced by a real dilemma. Here a sample of the html I am sifting through: 
<p><b>Area:</b>
<br><i>total:</i>
9,629,091 sq km
<br><i>land:</i>
9,158,960 sq km
<br><i>water:</i>
470,131 sq km
<p><b>Area - comparative:</b>
about one-half the size of Russia; about three-tenths the size of Afri
+ca; about one-half the size of South America (or slightly larger than
+ Brazil); slightly larger than China; about two and one-half times th
+e size of Western Europe
<p><b>Land boundaries:</b>
<br><i>total:</i>
12,248 km
<br><i>border countries:</i>
Canada 8,893 km (including 2,477 km with Alaska), Cuba 29 km (US Naval
+ Base at Guantanamo Bay), Mexico 3,326 km
<br><i>note:</i>
Guantanamo Naval Base is leased by the US and thus remains part of Cub
+a
<p><b>Coastline:</b>
19,924 km

[download]
Here is my regex to extract the data I want and some sample use of the code: 
sub extractData {
    ($start, $end, $rawData) = @_;
    if ($rawData =~ /$start\s*(.+?)\s*$end/) {
    $content = $1;
    } else {
    print "no location given, jackass.";
    $content = 0;
}
return $content;
}

$Start = "<i>total:</i>";
$End = "<br>";
$Area_total = extractData($Start, $End, $rawHtml);

[download]
This will work and will copy "9,629,091 sq km" to $Area_total. My problem is that after having that extracted I can seem to get similar data like the total under Land Boundries. I try the same code and It fails, I also tried to incorperate the
or the Land Boundries above it and have the result. I think that the newline screws it up somehow. Any thoughts?

In reply to Extracting similar data from html by Jrchak

Title:
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