Eventhough the thread's a bit old... There are problems with this approach. You should rellay consider using HTML::TreeBuilder, it's as easy as

  use HTML::TreeBuilder;
  my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new()->parse($data);

  for my $tag ($tree->look_down( _tag => "meta")) {
    $kWords{$tag->attr("name")} = $tag->attr("content");
  }
[download]

The above code takes care of spaces/linebreaks &s.o. And its fast and widely used. Just my 5cents. FJ