in reply to XML to HashRef and then to JSON

In what way do all these example convert the Emphasis tag wrong?

Update: Now that you've provided some examples, I highly doubt that any of the generic ways to parse your XML will know that "inner tags" are not really tags. The easiest way is likely to reconstruct your title tag by rolling up the children tags with it. Most modules provide a ->as_XML method which you can use to turn inner tags back to their string representation.