>I think I see what Bill means. The minimum you have to do to get a >piece of text out of a XML is: XMLOpen to open the document, then >XMLRoot to get a reference to the root node, then XMLFind (or other >commands) to get a reference to the node you want, and finally >XMLGetText to get the text (or XMLGetAttribute to get an attribute's >value.) > >You have to get used to it. > >Emmanuel Actually I've gotten the XML tools OSAX to work nicely (thank you very much!). Just wondering if System Events would be easier. And while I'm here, a question about that: the script errors trying to get data from elements named <date>. Looking the file in IE returns "Whitespace not allowed." Whitespace being defined, apparently, as slashes or dashes. So I renamed it <ddate> and both the script and IE are happy. These are just text files, not stuff on the web with a DTD. So apparently standard processing of XML expects fields named <date> to conform to type? Also complains about an ampersand in a description field. What other characters will trip it up? Any way to avoid these things without preprocessing the file? -- Bill Steele [log in to unmask]