FWIW: I use sed all the time to edit XML files. I wouldn't say I have any really large files (which is why i didn't respond earlier) but it works great for me. Regular expressions are your friend. 

--
Edward M. Corrado

On Jun 10, 2012, at 19:25, stuart yeates <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 09/06/12 06:36, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
> 
>> How do you guys deal with large XML files?
> 
> There have been a number of excellent suggestions from other people, but it's worth pointing out that sometimes low tech is all you need.
> 
> I frequently use sed to do things such as replace one domain name with another when a website changes their URL.
> 
> Short for Stream EDitor, sed is a core part of POSIX and should be available pretty on much every UNIX-like platform imaginable. For non-trivial files it works faster than disk access (i.e. works as fast as a naive file copy). Full regexp support is available.
> 
> sed 's/www.example.net/example.com/gI' < IN_FILE > OUT_FILE
> 
> Will stream IN_FILE to OUT_FILE replacing all instances of "www.example.net" with "example.com"
> 
> cheers
> stuart
> -- 
> Stuart Yeates
> Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/