Thank you very much for your reply and helpful comments.

You are right in that my XML might be invalid in the rigid sense of the specification. Nevertheless, it's well-balanced and does not have any problems except the ones which are related to the entities.

Regarding writing an own parser: I have thought about that since some time ago I already have written some simple parsers for other tasks. But after having looked into the XML specification, I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to write a full XML parser (excluding entity resolving) in reasonable time.

In fact, to achieve what I need, I have to use a full XML parser with all bells and whistles: Think of encoding, namespaces, the various sorts of declarations (attribute, element, ...), CDATA, PIs, and so on.

Probably it would be easier to modify one of the existing reliable parsers.

Thanks again,

Nocturnus