If you were using XML::Twig, you could have a handler watching for the start of a getrss tag. When that handler fired, it'd temporarilly remove all the other handlers until the closing tag was detected. You'd then have a complete tag and could then handle the innards however you liked (I suppose just a recursive call back to Twig). In general, this kind of flow control is much easier to achieve once you've delegated your parsing to a module so you can concentrate on the real task.