Two notes on the use of XML::Simple:

1. Since malformed XML is fatal to the parser you may want to wrap its evocation in an eval block.
2. Use forcearray to avoid problems with references when the returned structure has empty elements.

$hashref = eval{ XMLin($XMLinaString, forcearray => 1) };
xml_parse_failure($@) if $@; # an error trapping sub
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