You could patch the ticker to return the data in its flat record, parent pointer form instead of as a recursive data structure. Building the tree from the flat structure is a lot easier than reading the nested XML.

And now ive patched the ticker to do just this. And return some additional information. Try using 'flattree=1' to get the new output. Also, the ticker now responds to xmlstyle settings and has the customary info tag with data about the ticker and stuff like that.

You can build a fully connected tree structure from the "flattree" output quite easily. The algorithm is as follows:

my $res = $o->pm_get( node_id => 180684, id => 505536, flattree => 1 )
+;

my $data = XMLin( $res->content, ForceArray => 0 );

my %nodes;

foreach my $node ( @{ $data->{node} } ) {

    my $nid = $node->{node_id};

    # register this node so children can find it
    $nodes{ $nid } = $node;

    if ( my $pid = $node->{parent_node} ) {

        # tell the parent about this child
        $nodes{$pid}{kids}{$nid} = $node;

        # make the reference to the parent "hard" and not "soft"
        $node->{parent} = $nodes{$pid};

    }

}
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You are guaranteed that this will work. You dont need to worry about the parent not existing, or anything like that.