Another bit of the puzzle is that in the example you have give, the regular expression is being quoted using pipe symbols (|) instead of the usual forward slash.

Whoever wrote the regex probably did this to avoid having to escape the / in the closing tag. Personally, I always use /, so I would have written $xml =~ /<$fieldname>(.*?)<\/$fieldname>/i

Talking about parsing XML, what easy-to-use XML parser would the monks recommend? From the quick look I have taken at the documentation of a couple of XML parsers, it would take a week for me to figure out how to do something like "print out the content of every XYZ tag in the document, each one on a new line".