note Anonymous Monk The way to do this, without relying on the fact that the $p is a hashref, is to pass a closure as the handlers, and have an object that you created saved in the closure. This is how PerlSAX is implemented. <p> Witness: <p> <pre> my $handler = bless {}, "MyHandler"; my $p = XML::Parser->new(Handlers => { Start => sub { $handler->handle_start(@_) } }); package MyHandler; sub handle_start { my ($handler, $p, $element, %attribs) = @_; ... } </pre> 62782 62789 13