record separator causing problems

perlperlperl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

The input file file.xml contains some legal xml with root html tag with content in it. I have set the record separator to undef, so that the entire file is slurped into $records as one big line. In the regex match below, I am trying to get the contents of the html element. This works when I use a literal as the input, but not when I use the variable $records as the input to match, I get 'Use of uninitialized value $text in string at... ' at run time. Why? Am I not capturing the result of the match into $text?

 
use strict;
use warnings;

open FILE_IN, '<file.xml';
open FILE_OUT, '>results.txt';

$/ = undef;
my $records = <FILE_IN>;

my $text = "";

($text) = $records =~ m/<html>(.*)<\/html>/;

print "$text";


close FILE_IN;
close FILE_OUT;
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Puzzling.

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