This will probably do the trick, however this does not handle HTML tags that span multiple lines. To do that you'll most likely have to join all the lines together into one scalar. This will also not catch multiple HTML tags on the same line, you'll need to modify it to suit your needs.
What this is doing is finding text contained in <>'s that has a corresponding ending tag.
Here is the code ($l is the scalar holding the line of text):
if( $l =~ /<.*?>(.*?)<\/.*?>/ ) {
$l = $1;
}
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Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org>
http://frank.wiles.org