Well, I'm able to parse the entire XML document already using XML::Parser. For this operation, I don't really need to view the contents of the file as XML at all - just as a single big string. I'd like to simply do a one-shot removal of all the old data and then read it in as XML.

The option of using an XML based solution had occured to me, and quite possibly be what I end up using, but I was just interested if a regex could be used here or not. (Like I said, I'm still just learning regex's.)

Thanks for the link to Mather's modules - I haven't looked through them closely yet, but they look as if they might be very useful.

- Sherlock