Thank you all for your help.

I think my aversion to learning XML is really an aversion to learning XSLT -- I read a bit of the O'Relly book and it just seemed like page after page of "know how to do a 'for' loop? Well it's possible, though incredibly complicated and wordy, to do in XSLT".

I've been learning Perl and various other things like JavaScript for ages, and I haven't got the room in my brain to start learning a new and forbidding language.

I might try to do it with XML, but not using XSLT, using the module as suggested by Lestrrat.

After all, even if I ended up writing my own really bad parser, just because it's not being read by a formal XML parser, doesn't mean it couldn't be valid XML in case someone else wanted it...
--

($_='jjjuuusssttt annootthheer
     pppeeerrrlll haaaccckkeer')=~y/a-z//s;print;
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