that is reading a little broken - should read:

When the lines I want are returned there are "&\nbsp;" (minus the \) or a special character, I need to removes these.

I have tried

What is in $content?

Use Data::Dump and show the output of dd$content;

Why? See How do I post a question effectively? / Basic debugging checklist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nbsp#Encodings says U+00A0 so you can try one of these

s{\N{U+00A0}}{}gu
or
s/\xC2\xA0//g
or
s/\x{C2A0}//g
or
s/\xA0//g
[download]

See perlunitut: Unicode in Perl, perlrecharclass, perluniprops , perlop#Quote and Quote like Operators

Why TokeParser, why not HTML::TreeBuilder? HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath? Or XML::LibXML? Or XML::Twig? Even *gasp* HTML::HTML5::Parser?

See htmltreexpather.pl , Parsing HTML / Re^4: Parsing HTML, A regex question , NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day / Re: NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day , Re: Extracting HTML content between the h tags, Re^2: Help With Online Table Scraper, Re^4: web::scraper using an xpath, .... HTML Parser suggestions

You nailed it, thanks for your help!