To elaborate a bit on what ikegami said: you can either use "parsefile( $filename )", in which case you don't need to open the file yourself, or you can open an input file handle yourself, slurp its contents as a single string into a scalar variable, and use "parse( $xmlstring )".

I know the XML::Twig manual is terribly long (18,537 words!), but the solution you were looking for turns up in the first few paragraphs...