I'd like to learn more about XML, I have not found a tutorial that works for me, guess it is my brick wall. What I want to do is use a perl script to find the empty (no ascii) fields between items, line # of file would be great. The files are quite large, but here is a simple example: <abc>fds </abc> ok <ddd></ddd> not ok <eee> </eee> not ok Every time I start reading about xml or xml parsing, etc I get a headache. Thx.