This doesn't work, and actually causes the processor to spiral upward until the process is killed.

One point not covered yet - the problem you refer to above is not XML::Simple's problem.

For my own explorations with XML::Simple, and because of warnings that I might need to move to using one of the more complex XML parsers, I wrote a simple testcase generator to create some random, abitrarially complex "well-formed" XML files and subjectivly speaking (I haven't gotten around to using the benchmarking tools yet), XML::Simple proved more than adaquate in terms of both speed and memory usage upto depths of nesting of 20 or more and with upto 20 attributes per node. Thats as far as I bothered to go cos nothing I am working with yet will come even close.

My point is, that if XML::Simple is running away processing your simple nested example, you have a broken installation I think. I even tried diliberately breaking it by cross-nesting stuff and XML::Simple whirred for a second or two before saying:

mismatched tag at line ll, column cc, byte bb:
[download]

no matter how deviously I tried to fool it.