read XML xml element with REGEXP

Hi, I would need to read an xml element from an xml file to a local variable. Please could you help me with a shell script to get so? Considering that I have a file called file.xml like below:

<header>
<description>This is the description</description>
<content>This is the content</content>
</header>

What I'd like is to assign the value of "description" tag ("This is the description") to a local variable.

I guess this could be done by usig regular expressions...

Thanks in advance.

I should have looked deeper into the Forums. I have found a good solution in How To get the data from a tag in XML File

Thks.

Hre is one way of doing it

var=$(sed -n 's/\(<description>\)\([[:print:]]*\)<\/[^>]*>/\2/p' infile