kvale: if you must introduce this person to the evil of regexes ;), at least watch out for a subtle bug that you've introduced. What happens if your first match succeeds and the rest fail? The subsequent variables will be set to the first one's value, thus hampering error checking. I would rewrite that as follows:

my ($file)  = $string =~ /<file>([^<]+)/;
my ($line)  = $string =~ /<line>([^<]+)/;
my ($type)  = $string =~ /<type>([^<]+)/;
my ($codee) = $string =~ /<codee>([^<]+)/;
my ($desc)  = $string =~ /<desc>([^<]+)/;
[download]

That should be a bit safer. Or better yet, go with a hash:

my %info; # a better name should be picked
foreach ( qw/ file line type codee desc / ) {
  my ($info{$_}) = $string =~ /<\Q$_\E>([^<]+)/;
}
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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