I should perhaps have told that my XML parsing needs do not have a very high byte count - so I am not very concerned about efficiency at this point.

So the main reason for using the msxml COM engine is the same as for climbing mount Everest: it's there.

I do not need to install anything ,and I get an alternate drop-inimplementation from Xerces COM interface (that I do have to install - check apache.org's site for xerces-c, not the like named java implementation).

I could (but have not done it) get the native perl/xerces interface, whose performance should be comparable to xerces.

As for perl's XML:: hierarchy, I do not know. I was never able to get a clean windoze install, from CPAN or otherwise though things hav eprobably improved since my last attempt. I heard people that went through it and were much less then awed by the performance level. (And truly, a large DOM tree made entirely of perl objects must be an unwieldy beast..)

Cheers,
alf
--<br: You can't have everything: where would you put it?

Yea, it was an effort to install XML::Twig, since it doesn't have a PPM. I posted a new thread on that and windows installing in general.

What good is half a gigabyte of RAM if not to support the occasional unwieldly beast <g>. I'll keep an eye on the performance issue. I can process a twig at a time on input, and I think I can render the twig into a text string and store it that way, even though I have to wait 'till I have them all so I can print the final file in sorted order. But that doesn't mean I have to keep a fully-parsed representation around!

Thanks,

—John