I've been tasked with parsing some (simplified) XML. And unfortunately, I've been told I can't use any external modules - only what comes with perl 5 - and it has to be "pure perl" (not using the expat C library). The XML is pretty simple, in a format like this: 
<some_tag>
  <tag>value</tag>
  <tag2>value</tag2>
</some_tag>

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Just tags and elements - no attributes. I figured I'd write an event-based parser, invoking handlers for each tag start and tag end. But what's the best way to write the parser? A state machine? If so, should it go character-by-character (collapse the input down to one line and then process by character)? Or is there a regex-based approach? Yes, I realize this is The Dumb Way to do XML, but that's what's been dropped on my lap.

In reply to Parsing XML...by hand (ugh) by raindog308

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