Temporarily strip HTML

[epoptai]

I've got a string with text and html tags destined for a process that will damage the html. So I want to temporarily replace the html with placeholders while storing a "placeholder => html" map in a hash, so it can be restored after the destructive process.

As an example I need to turn this:

$str = 
 qq~This <b>contains</b> both text and <a href="http://www.w3c.org">ht
+ml</a>.~;

Into this string and hash:

$str = qq~This <1>contains<2> both text and <3>html<4>.~;

$html = {
    1 => 'b',
    2 => '/b',
    3 => 'a href="http://www.w3c.org"',
    4 => '/a'
    }

Then I can process the string and restore the html with something like:

$str =~ s|<(\d+)>|<$$html{$1}>|g;

I thought this would be easy, but I'm still staring at the wall. Thanks.

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