If you're using a handler, you can get the data in "name" in your StartTag handler. The attributes are arguments to the handler, like this:

my $data = <<STOP;
<outside>
  <inside name="Wibble">some data</inside>
</outside>
STOP

my $parser = new XML::Parser(Handlers => {
    Start => \&start_tag
});

$parser->parse($data);

sub start_tag {
    my $expat = shift;
    my $element = shift;
    my %attrs = @_;

    print $attrs{name};
}
[download]

use Data::Dumper;
my $tree = $parser->parse($data);
print Dumper $tree;
[download]

With the Tree style, each element node is an array. The first member is the name of that element, the second is a reference to an array (the content of that element). The first item of that array is a hash reference which contains any attributes (or nothing, if there are none). The data structure looks something like this:

[ "outside",
    [ "inside",
        [ { "name" => "Wibble"},
         0, "some data"]
    ]
]
[download]

Yuck.

Yeah, the Tree style is kind of icky, I think. :)

To the OP: if your XML file is pretty simple, you should try using XML::Simple. It loads your data into a nice hash-of-hashes tree.

use XML::Simple;
my $xml = XMLin("foo.xml");

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper $xml;
[download]

For your particular example, I got these results:

$VAR1 = {
          'inside' => {
                        'name' => 'Wibble',
                        'content' => 'some data'
                      }
        };
[download]

So you could get the contents of name like this:

my $name = $xml->{'inside'}{'name'};
[download]