Oh, if we are pimping alternate modules, then of course id IS magical in XML::Twig:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::Twig;
my $xml_string = <<EOF;
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<aaa id='test'>
<bbb/>
</aaa>
</root>
EOF
my $t= XML::Twig->nparse( $xml_string);
my $elem= $t->getElementById( 'test');
$elem->print;
And of course you can use it to process HTML too (it sub-contracts the HTML to XHTML conversion to HTML::TreeBuilder):
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::Twig;
my $html_string = <<EOF;
<html>
<head><title>Just a quick example</title></head>
<body><h1>Example</h1>
an example<p>
<div id="test">gotcha!</div>
<hr>
</html>
EOF
my $t= XML::Twig->new->parse_html( $html_string);
my $elem= $t->getElementById( 'test');
$elem->print;
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