Apparently not. Every man can make mistakes.

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

my @strings = (
    'hello',
    'hello >knowled<ge< goodbye',
    'hello >knowledge< goodbye',
    'hello >!knowledge< goodbye',
);


for (@strings) {
    if ( />(.+)</ ) {

        my $word = $1;

        if ( $word =~ /^\w[^><]*$/ ) {
            say $word;
        }
    }
}
[download]

...seems fine. But I am actually reading from a corpus. So the whole program looks like this (with ikegami's suggestion):

use warnings;
open FILE, "parole.sgm" or die "Couldn't open file.";
while (<FILE>) { print "$_ " for />([^<>]+)</g };
close FILE;
[download]

So, can you rephrase your arrays solution to fit my filehandle program?

Furthermore, ikegami almost fixed my little program with the exception that all commas, periods etc. have a space on each side instead of only having one at the end as it should be. Is that doable?