As noted elsewhere, there isn't really a switch statement in perl.

You can get a nice effect though - and also answer your question about removing the repeated bit of code - by using a dispatch table. Perl has the nice feature of anonymous subroutines/closures, which allow you to write a snippet of code in the middle of another function. These snippets are scalars (since they are references) and so can be stored anywhere you can normally store a scalar, in particular as a hash value.

So you can do things like:

my %dispatch_table = (
  sloven => sub { return sloven('xml'); },
  badger => sub { return badger2xml(); },
);


my $case = 'sloven';
my $subref = $dispatch_table{$case};
$responseXML .= $subref->();
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Your code snippets can take arguments (which you'd put in place of the dots in the ->(...) call) and access them in the normal with via @_. They can also do anything code can do (including random sideeffects) rather than just returning a value as above.

All in all, a cool and useful technique.