Regex to match all HTML tags except and

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If you insist on using a regex, something like this will work in most cases:

# Remove all HTML except "p" tags
$html =~ s{<(?>/?)(?:[^pP]|[pP][^\s>/])[^>]*>}{}g;

Explanation:

s{
  <             # opening angled bracket
  (?>/?)        # ratchet past optional / 
  (?:
    [^pP]       # non-p tag
    |           # ...or...
    [pP][^\s>/] # longer tag that begins with p (e.g., <pre>)
  )
  [^>]*         # everything until closing angled bracket
  >             # closing angled bracket
 }{}gx; # replace with nothing, globally

But really, save yourself some headaches and use a parser instead. CPAN has several modules that are suitable. Here’s an example using the HTML::TokeParser module that comes with the extremely capable HTML::Parser CPAN distribution:

use strict;

use HTML::TokeParser;

my $parser = HTML::TokeParser->new('/some/file.html')
  or die "Could not open /some/file.html - $!";

while(my $t = $parser->get_token)
{
  # Skip start or end tags that are not "p" tags
  next  if(($t->[0] eq 'S' || $t->[0] eq 'E') && lc $t->[1] ne 'p');

  # Print everything else normally (see HTML::TokeParser docs for explanation)
  if($t->[0] eq 'T')
  {
    print $t->[1];
  }
  else
  {
    print $t->[-1];
  }
}

HTML::Parser accepts input in the form of a file name, an open file handle, or a string. Wrapping the above code in a library and making the destination configurable (i.e., not just printing as in the above) is not hard. The result will be much more reliable, maintainable, and possibly also faster (HTML::Parser uses a C-based backend) than trying to use regular expressions.

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