I've been down this road before, and depending on what you're trying to do another answer is to use XSLT. Now if you're not familiar with it, it certainly takes getting used to. Even when I knew it I would write a program using XML::Twig. In hindsight I've found using a simple XSLT copy template, and then adding in the templates for the cases you need is best. Additionally, the nice thing about XSLT is that you can read ahead/behind of your current node in order to pull different values together. The next level is to realize you can plug in Java functions into the namespace and get any kind of programming done. Of course none of this takes into account your memory or processing speed requirements.