Why are you using something as low level as XML::Parser?

FWIW XML::Parser Tutorial also explains about char handler ...

instead of XML::Simple use XML::Rules, see more about xml rules

Then there is XML::Twig Quick Reference and XML::LibXML

HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath or XML::LibXML with tools like xpather.pl/htmltreexpather.pl which can give you paths to start with, and all the links here Re: Retrieve select information from HTML, they're examples(for tree-xpath and others)/walkthroughs/tutorials ...

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)