Try changing your while regex to something like:

while($xml=~m/\<(.+?)(\s.*?)?\>(.+?)\<\/\1\>/sig){
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and then $2 is your attributes and $3 is your element body.

You also might consider one of the various XML parsing modules available from CPAN like XML::Simple for instance. Robust XML parsing is not simple - there are just so many details that can trip you up.