As a start-tag is not allowed to contain whitespace (since whitespace is used as a delimiter between the tag and the attributes) or the > character, the character class of excluded characters should only contain these two characters. For good measure I have added ? and ! to exclude xml-headers, doctype elements, processings instructions and the like.

s{(<[^\s?!>]+)}{(my $tagname = $1 ) =~ tr/.//d;$tagname;}eg;

Yes that will cause the substitiution part to trigger even when there are no dots in the tagname, but it makes the whole of the regex much simpler and easier to understand and debug.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.