There have been plenty of working regexes posted for this thread, i thought there should be at least one reply that uses a parser. I'll assume that when you say you want the description, you really want the content from the meta tag. 
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $description;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(*DATA);

while (my $token = $p->get_token) {
   if ($token->is_start_tag('meta')) {
      my $attr = $token->return_attr;
      if (defined $attr->{name}) {
         $description = $attr->{content};
         last;
      }
   }
}

print "TokeParser got '$description'\n";

__DATA__
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http:/
+/www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="Hello HTML Parsing!" />
<meta name="keywords" content="make me the top hit!" />
<meta name="generator" content="Perl, baby. Perl." />
</head>
<body>
Hello World
</body>
</html>

[download]

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

In reply to (jeffa) Re: Reg Expressions by jeffa
in thread Reg Expressions by mikeblatter

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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