I didn't know what to do with the xml that you added into the code. I tried reading it in a few ways, didn't help. I have to read a file that I download from a repository and have to load it into my parser

XML::Twig is flexible in that it allows you to parse either a file (as you have done) or a Perl scalar variable (as I have done). Using the latter is merely for the convenience of creating a small self-contained code sample.