<rant>

It's hard to follow your post in the current format. When you are posting a question you'll find that you will get a better response if you follow the site rules for posting follow this link to find more details.

</rant>

Ok, so you have a problem parsing a XML file. A good place to start is to dump out the reference return by XMLin. This will give you all the clues you'll need to retrieve the data you require. Below is a small example script....

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

$/ = undef;
my $string = <DATA>;
my $ref = XMLin($string);
print Dumper $ref;

__DATA__

<config>
        <columnname>DATE extract</columnname> 
        <columnname>DATE_deleted</columnname>
        <columnname>DATE1</columnname> 
        <columnname>DATE2</columnname>
</config>
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You'll find that this example outputs the following.

$ perl xml.pl
$VAR1 = {
          'columnname' => [
                          'DATE extract',
                          'DATE_deleted',
                          'DATE1',
                          'DATE2'
                        ]
        };
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So $ref->{columnname} is a reference to an array. You can access it like.

my @columnames = @{$ref->{columnname}};

or loop over it without assignment.

printf "%s\n", $_ for (@{$ref->{columnname}});
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