Looking at my code I know that the way I am going about this is really inefficient.

you need m//x and qr//x, see perlfaq6#How can I hope to use regular expressions without creating illegible and unmaintainable code?

while(  $content =~ m{$bigone}si  ){
   # $1 $2  $3 ... are defined here
}
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see XML::Twig, XML::LibXML, Mojo::DOM ... see Re: The best module for handling xml for examples, walkthroughs, follow my links and the links they link, like these Re: How to grab a portion of file with regex (don't)(parsing html/xml with xpath/twig/dom, because html::parser is low level), Re: How to grab a portion of file with regex (parsing html/xml with xpath/twig/dom, because xml::parser is low level), Re^4: How to grab a portion of file with regex (parsing html/xml with xpath/twig/dom, because ::parser is low level)