Ah, but in order to clean it, you must do some kind of parsing. (That's what the process of reading a text stream in order to perform operations that will output a transformed text stream is.) My point is that regular expressions alone are prone to failure.

But if you're looking to do a RE only solution, and you're ONLY looking to remove EMPTY tags then something involving a match on >< with a look-behind for < and look-ahead for > might do...

Good luck in any event!

Update: I'm not claiming to have a dictionary definition of parsing, I was just trying to explain how I see the situation: reading the file, separating tag from text, and throwing away the empty tags... in short, parsing :)

Update: no problem vek, I didn't think it was a dodgy post in the least, and I wasn't trying to beat you down at all - in fact it sounds like you have way more experience with XML parsing than I do! Code on brother....