Careful! There are a few gotchas in that snippet. First, there's a greedy match. If you have a string containing <p>one paragraph</p><p>another paragraph</p>, $2 will contain one paragraph</p><p>another paragraph. Besides that, if the regex succeeds, $2 won't contain what you expect. You can also leave off the default variable and certainly don't need to capture the paragraph tags. I'd prefer:

Of course, if there's anything more complicated than bare paragraph tags, you're better off using an HTML parser module.