I have done some more work on this. I can unload entries from the dictionary database and run them through the perl scripts outside of the main editorial system. In that way, I can cut out bits of the entry to see what Perl is objecting to.

I have discovered that there is one element which causes this warning. Removing the element altogther allows the DTD parser to work and it then finds three DTD errors in the rest of the entry. So that answers my question about whether I could just disable the warning (answer: no).

However the weird thing is that when I experiment with removing some of the content of the problematic element I can reach a point where I lose the "deep recursion" warning but I don't get the other DTD errors either. This is a bit puzzling.

The problem with the element in question seems to be that it actually has a very flat structure: lots of sibling elements all children of this one element with no deeper structure. The line in Error.pm appears to be turning previous elements within the tested element into strings so I can see how the last element in this flat structure could end up calling this very recursively. However as someone said above the data is what it is.

The only other options I can see would be to change the recursion limit itself but looking at other discussions of recursion in Perl in PM, it doesn't look simple to change. In any case Perl was compiled by root and I don't have root level privileges on this system so I'd need to ask the sysadmin to do this.

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