Hi Craig,
sorry for being so late with my response.
There is indeed a reason why I don't use those standard functions.
The structure of the XML I try to read has a tree-structure that those functions do not understand, eg. I have a date with 3 child nodes building day, month and year.
My knowledge about XML is not outstanding so maybe there is a way to use the XML functions of VFP but I don't think so.
I forgot to say that the structures in the XML are not created by VFP. It's a standard structure for insurance policies that has multiple insured persons, objects etc.
I hope you can give me some directions, because I haven't gotten any further since monday!

TIA,
Erwin