If you want to use XML::Parser and it's ilk then you should just download a binary version of it and copy the the right files to the appropriate places. If however, you can't find a binary version of XML::Parser and you really are stuck up the proverbial creek then you might want to check out the extract_tagged method in Text::Balanced. From the docs:

# Extract the initial substring of $text that is bounded by
# a C<BEGIN>...C<END> pair. Don't allow nested C<BEGIN> tags

($extracted, $remainder) =
    extract_tagged($text,"BEGIN","END",undef,{bad=>["BEGIN"]});
[download]

HTH

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broquaint