If you are going to remove <REF ...> tags, you really should be removing the </REF> tags too, don't you think?

And there is a funny thing about your sample xml data: the "T" in the "STYPE" attribute of the REF tag is actually a Cyrillic "T", not an ASCII "T". Is that why you're trying to get rid of the REF tags, because they all got corrupted somehow? (It must have been caused by someone trying to do stream-edits on the XML data...) You could just fix that: 

perl -CS -pe 'tr{\x{422}}{T}' file.xml > fixed.file.xml

[download]
As mentioned earlier, just removing the tags is pretty simple -- it can be a one-liner on the command line -- if the <REF...> thing is never split up by a line break, but even if it is, you can just run perl in "file-slurp" mode: 
perl -0777 -pe 's{</?REF[^>]*>}{}g' file.xml > noref.file.xml

[download]
It seems like a pretty safe bet that REF tags will never contain a ">" as part of an attribute, so this approach should suffice.

In reply to Re: problem with removing something in XML file by graff
in thread problem with removing something in XML file by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.