Igor V. Rafienko wrote: > The problem is that the file looks like this: > > <data> ... lots of schnappi records ...
okay. I think your first approach from cElementTree import iterparse for event, elem in iterparse("data.xml"): if elem.tag == "schnappi": count += 1 elem.clear() is the right one for this case. with this code, the clear call will destroy each schnappi record when you're done with it, so you will release all memory allocated for the schnappi elements. however, you will end up with a single toplevel element that contains a large number of empty subelements. this is usually no problem (it'll use a couple of megabytes), but you can get rid of the dead schnappis too, if you want to. see the example that starts with "context = iterparse" on this page http://effbot.org/zone/element-iterparse.htm for more information. </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list