There is a very good reason for the current behaviour: NULL gets mapped to no element, empty string gets mapped to empty element.

If you really need to confuse the two concepts, you can write a SAX filter (put it between the generator and your consumer) which fills in the missing elements.

On a side note: if you need a CSV, why are you passing through XML?

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile

Most of my code is tested...

Perl is strongly typed, it just has very few types (Dan)