Good evening my fine monks, please offer me some kind advice for my sometimes foolish questions.

I'm working with XML::Simple and Data::Dumper.

Both seem to work great, I can pass my xml file and I can get the dump w/ no problem.

My question is: "How can I count the number of elements in LOGENTRY, if the data is stored in a scalar rather than a hash?"
In my simplified version I can obviously tell that I have 4 elements, but in a more complex one I have more, say 80 or 150. I'd use a subroutime to print the 129th element if it exists (or whatever).

simplified script

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
my $file = "test.xml";
my $config = XMLin($file);
print Dumper($config);
exit;
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simplified output

$VAR1 = {
          'LOGENTRY' => [
                          {
                            'DATE' =>  'Date 0',
                            'MEMO' =>  'Memo 0',
                            'TITLE' => 'Test 0'
                          },
                          {
                            'DATE' =>  'Date 1',
                            'MEMO' =>  'Memo 1',
                            'TITLE' => 'Text 1'
                          },
                          {
                            'DATE' =>  'Date 2',
                            'MEMO' =>  'Memo 2',
                            'TITLE' => 'Text 2'
                          },
                          {
                            'DATE' =>  'Date 3',
                            'MEMO' =>  'Memo 3',
                            'TITLE' => 'Text 3'
                          }
                        ]
        };
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thanks
(not even close to a saint) paul