Thank you both for the quick response. Toolic, thanks for the suggestion to go with twig. I hadn't read much on it because parser did pretty much what I needed it to do until now. I'm going to run some benchmarks when I have the chance.

Perlbotics, thanks for the info. It doesn't seem like a likely route i'll take because I don't even know who handles the XML file but I'll take your code and dissect it to see what I can learn from it.