To underscore some of what other monks have already told you, let me recommend a book: Perl & XML by Erik Ray and Jason McIntosh.

I've only just begun to go through the book but from the "skimming" of it that I've done it has given me loads of ideas already on doing better XML work with Perl.

The moral of the story: don't make work for yourself. There are lots of good modules out there for dealing with XML starting with XML::Simple, cpan::XML::Parser and friends.