Dear code4libbers,

I love you. 

Thank you for that Stack Overflow post.  I love reading those. It seems the ones I end up reading are usually of the, "Hey, you moron, why are you trying to do that in the first place?  Don't you know you can write [whatever] in [whatever language only two people know, one of whom is dead, and the other one lives in a fortress in a remote location and only answers questions in dactylic hexameter mirror-written on parchment with iron gall ink] and that will make your problem disappear? Duh!"

All of this effort, by the way, is to massage these records so that I can feed them into an importer for another system...and the importer is not doing what the specs say it should do. My records are a thing of beauty now, and they are destined for the dustbin. 

But at least I have learned new XML skills!

Julie
Learner of Things the Hard Way