I guess the crux of the question still stands: Why an array? That is, as opposed to a single scalar string? or a data structure populated by an XML parsing module? Perl can access the content in these other forms too, and possibly to better effect -- unless you have some specific plan in mind that makes the array a better approach.

If you really are talking about a data file (i.e. on local disk), you can slurp the whole file into a scalar, or read it line-by-line into an array, or (best yet) parse it into a data structure. Maybe if you show a little bit of code that you're trying out, or at least some pseudo-code that describes what sort of processing you want to accomplish (what does input look like, what does output look like, etc), we'll understand what you're talking about.