On Jun 8, 2012, at 2:36 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:

> I'm working on a script that needs to be able to crosswalk at least a
> couple hundred XML files regularly, some of which are quite large.

[trimmed]

> How do you guys deal with large XML files? Thanks,

um ... I return ASCII tab-delim records, because IDL's XML processing
routines have some massive issue with garbage collection if you walk
down the DOM tree.  However, no one in their right mind uses IDL
for XML, as it's basically Fortran w/ multi-dimensional arrays.

...

Everyone else is going to tell you to use SAX, and they're probably
right, but as you sound to be as reluctant as I am on using SAX,
another alternative may be Perl's XML::Twig:

	http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?XML::Twig

-Joe