I'm definately not an expert, but I've got a similar script that I use to parse a file in the same way. This is the code I wrote to do so, modified to work with your file. I'm sure there is a better way to do this. It puts whatever is between the *DESCRIPTION and the *END into the @description array. You can then loop over @description and do what you wish with it.

#!/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open (DATA, "text.txt") || die "Can't access test\n";
#each element in the array is a single line
my @data = <DATA>;
close(DATA);

#vars to manipulate the data
my $line="";
my @description = ("");
my $found = "false";

#while it is not the end of the file
while($line = shift @data){
  chomp $line;
  if($line =~ "DESCRIPTION"){
    $line = shift @data;
    chomp $line;
    while(!($line =~ "END")){
      if(!($line =~ ";")){
        push @description, $line;
      }
      $line = shift(@data);
      chomp $line;
    }
    print "[",@description, "]\n";

    #if there's going to be more descriptions in the same file
    #then we can clear the array and keep going through the 
    #file until we run out of lines.  Otherwise @description 
    #will continue to accumulate strings

    #@description = ("");
  }
}
if($found eq "false"){
  #then we didn't find a description
  #add it here
}
[download]

That will at least answer your first question.