I love perl, I really do. The problem is that I need to also work with XML as well. CPAN has numerous modules that work with XML to one degree or another.

Producing XML is simple and easy. Reading or manipulating it involves loading the XML through a parser. The parsers will create a myriad of hashes, arrays and the like but navigating them even with tools like XPath make you want to perform oral surgery on yourself using rusty tiddly winks.

So my question is this: Are there any XML parsers for Perl that are easy to use without having to deal with arbitrary hashes of hashes of hashes and .... (don't forget the arrays)?

UPDATE:My intention in my original question was that when you look at many of the XML parsing modules, they create hashes of XXXX where the depth tends to become rather unwieldly. XML::Simple is good for simple XML but not not so much for complex XML. On the flip side, libXML is a bit much for simple XML.

The thing that started all this? Flickr::API using the abandoned XML::Parser::Lite::Tree module. Granted Flickr's REST interface is simple ... it just happened to be the last straw.

Let me formally apologize to anyone that took offense