Telnet, XML API, and I/O Buffering

Greetings, again, O Wise Monks. I have a bit of an issue in dealing with an API that uses XML to drive it, and I know that there has to be a (relatively) simple way to do what I'm attempting. All the pertinent details are below:

Problem: Need to use the API of an aplication to get a list of items in its internal database.

facts:

• The application and reporter programs are on two different servers
• to interact with the API of the application, telnet (or a socket-based connection are needed

Analysis:

What I have so far is two different ways to approach this:

• use a socket connection, with print and read functions to capture the output
• use a socket connection and sysread/syswrite functions to capture the output

The problem that I am running into is, if I use print and read, the interactivity with the application suffers, and I can't seem to get it to recognize that I sent it a request, so my script just hangs.

Likewise, if I use sysread/syswrite, I get the interactivity, and get some of the output, but the XML::LibXML parser dies because I don't capture all of the output...

Code snippets:

This is what I'm working with:

my $NODEREC = " <XML REQUEST RECORD GOES HERE> "

my $sok = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => $WYSHOST,
                                 PeerPort => $WYSPORT,
                                 Proto => "tcp")
or die "couldn't connect to WysDM host $WYSHOST : $!\n";

#$sok->autoflush(1);
$| = 1;

my $parser = XML::LibXML->new;
[download]

From there, the two options I have tried are:

print $sok "$NODEREC\n";
while ($line = <$sok>){
   print "reading line\n";
   chomp($line);
   push(@output, $line);
}
[download]

or, using sysread

syswrite $sok, $NODEREC;
syswrite $sok, "\n";
my $blksize = (stat $sok)[11] || 16384;
my $len = sysread $sok, $res, $blksize;
my $ds = $parser->parse_string("$res");
[download]

What recommendations can ou give me on the optimal way to perform this task?

Many Thanks in Advance

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