There are lax XML parsers, they're called non-validating. It is supposed to handle <foo /> (as the comments indicate), but I negelected to test that yet, and have posted prematurely. I am working on it now, thank you.

UPDATE: This now works, it was meant to, but that's what I get for not testing all cases... As for generic I meant as opposed to podmaster's XML ticker parsers which also user substr but in a format dependent manner.

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perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"