I have been using XML for almost 2 years now. I have found that many of my day-to-day tasks are best handled with a simple XPath statement. I use this tool for coming up with the correct statements;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmltree

I have been using MSXML3 mostly but I think XML::XPath could be used like so;

use XML::XPath;
use XML::XPath::XMLParser;

my $xp = XML::XPath->new(filename => 'monks.xml');

my $nodeset = $xp->find('/monk/say/text()'); # what the monks say

foreach my $node ($nodeset->get_nodelist)
{
    $_ = XML::XPath::XMLParser::as_string($node);
    
    print "$_\n" if(/FOO/);
    
}
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