One idea (thought process):

Until you empty the string:

• Strip leading whitespace
• If you start with a '<', grab up to next '>' (use non-greedy, and store into array
• Otherwise grab up to next '<', and put into array.
• Repeat

You should now have an array like (for the above) ( '<Reference1>', '<reference1_name>', 'jvdsj', ...)

Now repeat until the array is empty, with a fresh hash:

• If top element start with < but not with </, then:
  • Create a key with the text of that tag, and create a new hash for this.
  • Push that text into a stack array, and the hash into a stack of hashes. (That is, at all times, your current level is denoted by the [-1] element of the stack array, and the hash to insert into is the [-1] element of the stack of hashes
• If the element starts with </, then:
  • Pop the last items off the the two stack arrays until the [-1] of the stack array is equal to the rest of this current tag. If you pop all the elements off, you've got a malformed element.
• Otherwise, push the element into the [-1] hash of the stack of hashes, say in the 'data' element.

This assumes that leading whitespace in the data themselves are unneeded (though that can be worked around), and that < will not be unescaped in the data spaces.

Update I'm watching other responses to this node, but I'm wondering if a very lightweight XML parser module based on this idea might be worth it. I see that someone's pointed out XML::Sax, which appears to not require external libs, but to get an XML parser requires what appears to be 3 additional modules. The above pseudo code, on the other hand, could be made into a single module, say, XML::PureSimple, which would not handle bad XML gracefully, but could be used to handle anything that follows the basic XML patterns. If anyone thinks there might be such a use of a module, drop me a msg or similar.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important