How do I remove HTML from a string?

The most correct way (albeit not the fastest) is to use HTML::Parse from CPAN (part of the libwww-perl distribution, which is a must-have module for all web hackers).

Many folks attempt a simple-minded regular expression approach, like s/<.*?>//g, but that fails in many cases because the tags may continue over line breaks, they may contain quoted angle-brackets, or HTML comment may be present. Plus folks forget to convert entities, like < for example.

Here's one ``simple-minded'' approach, that works for most files: 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -p0777
    s/<(?:[^>'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>//gs

If you want a more complete solution, see the 3-stage striphtml program in http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/striphtml.gz .