Hi, see what the Monks said about using the right tools to work with your XML.

But in general, one way to do what you want when you don't know whether you have a simple scalar value or a reference to an array, without a loop or multiple print statements, is to use the default list separator, stored in the special global var $", and just interpolate the list, after you extract it based on your ref check:

perl -Mstrict -wE '
my $foo = "bar";
my $baz = [ "qux", "quux" ]; # we have both kinds
local $" = "\n";             # change list separator to a newline

say ( ref $_ eq "ARRAY" ? "@$_" : $_ ) for ( $foo, $baz );
'
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Output:

bar
qux
quux
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Hope this helps!