I faced a problem very similar to this a few months back. I ended creating some ugly code which essentially stitched together partial snippets into well formed xml blocks, then passed those blocks to the parser.

I did find a parse_more method in XML::Parser::ExpatNB, which looked like it might do the trick, but never got around to actually seeing if it could parse unbalanced xml snippets.

UPDATE

I did some hacking on the ExpatNB solution, here's what I came up with. It would have been much better than stream mender I put together myself.

#!/usr/bin/env/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::Parser::Expat;
use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);

my $parser = XML::Parser::ExpatNB->new();

$parser->setHandlers('Start' => \&sh,
                     'End'   => \&eh,
                     'Char'  => \&ch);

foreach my $snippet qw( < bro ke nx ml> con tent < /bro kenxm l> ) {
    print "Waiting for an event...\n";
    $parser->parse_more($snippet);
}

sub sh {
   print "A start element: ", Dumper($_[1]), "\n";
}

sub eh {
   print "An end element: ", Dumper($_[1]), "\n";
}

sub ch {
   print "Some Data: ", Dumper($_[1]), "\n";
}

1;
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