http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=459809


in reply to Why do you need to escape a string used as a paramater?

You are passing a reference to tell the constructor to read from its referent.
If you omit the backslash the constructor thinks you want to pass a filehandle or a filename and this will not work for you most likeley because you don't have a filehandle or filename named $intr_html.

'perldoc HTML::TokeParser' tells you more ;-)