Programmatic access of hashes

[rthawkcom]

I'm trying to build my own XML parser and have encountered an interesting problem. I need a way of programmatically accessing a hash in order to transfer the XML data structure into that hash.

Example XML:

<one>
    <two>
        <three>
        value
        </three>
    </two>
<one>

Parsing the XML is easy enough, but how to put what I have captured into a hash? I'm thinking something along the lines of:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;


my $DATA;
my @keys=qq(one two three);# Data we captured from parsing above XML
my $newhash=&pfm(@keys,'value');# Make a new hash?
$DATA={%$DATA,%$newhash};# Slap it back into the main data hash, repea
+t as necessary?

sub pfm{

}

print Dumper $hash;

$hash = {
          'one' => {
                     'two' => {
                                'three' => 'value'
                              }
                   }
        };

Ideas? (other than just use XML::Simple !!) Not much info out there about dynamic building of hashes.