This code feels... itchy... to me. No offense ;)

None Taken!

The idea of this bit is to extract the next level of an XML tree ( stored in a hash, in this case $hash )

So if ref( $hash ) ne 'HASH' then we are at a leaf and $hash is the actual value and not a sub-tree, and hence the $data = $hash ( now they are both scalar )

On the other hand, if ref($hash) eq 'HASH' then we are dealing with a sub-tree - so $data = $$hash{$name} is fine.

There is, however, one exception, and that is when '$hash' contains the key 'CONTENT' like so: $$hash{ CONTENT }. In that case $$hash{ CONTENT } is not a sub-tree but a place holder for the actual data and hence the  $data = $$data{CONTENT}

Of course this requires that CONTENT is never a key in our hash (although it might be a node in the XML) - but that is achieved during parsing of the XML into the hash.