I like asiufy's idea and I'll definatly look into XML::Parser's subs style in the future. I don't think this is really the best way to go as I don't know the names of the tags that I'm looking for until runtime. On my test data file there are around 350,000 making me wonder if firing a start tag, end tag, etc handler a good idea.

For the same reasons, I was a bit scared off mirod's idea, there is anywhere between 10 and 30 columns I'm looking for so going through the data file and adding the CDATA sections seems a bit inefficient. I will bear this idea in mind, I'm tempted to try and change the data files to use these.

The best I can come up with is a single loop:

while (/<([^>]+)>/g) {
    if ($1 eq '/r') {  
        print Dumper(\%temp);
        undef %temp;  
    } else {
        next unless $wanted{$1};
        if (substr($1, 0, 1) eq '/') {
          my $text = substr($_,$pos,pos()-$pos-length($1)-2);     
           $temp{substr($1, 1)} = $text;
        } else {
            $pos = pos();
        }
    }

}
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gav^