this seems to be resolved to <tag><SOMETHING></tag>

This makes no sense. There's no way it would return that as text. You should get at least 3 callbacks: element start, one or more string of characters, element end. And you do: 

use strict;
use warnings;

BEGIN {
   package MySAXHandler;
   use parent 'XML::SAX::Base';
   sub start_element { print "element $_[1]{Name}\n"; }
   sub end_element   { print "element end\n"; }
   sub characters    { print "text $_[1]{Data}\n"; }
}

#use XML::SAX;
use XML::SAX::PurePerl;

#my $parser = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser(
my $parser = XML::SAX::PurePerl->new(
    Handler => MySAXHandler->new(),
);

$parser->parse_uri("foo.xml");

[download]
<root><tag>&lt;SOMETHING&gt;</tag></root>

[download]
element root
element tag
text <
text SOMETHING
text >
element end
element end

[download]

It sounds like you're building XML from text without converting the text to XML.

Because you blamed the module instead of showing your broken code, I have no time to look into whether the parser is capable of handling DTDs or provide a implicit mechanism for entity definition.

In reply to Re: XML::SAX::PurePerl, handle entities by ikegami
in thread XML::SAX::PurePerl, handle entities by VirtualRider

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