Why you want to reinvent the whell?
One of the best parsers available is MSXML 4.0 Parser. This is a better way to handle XML files than XMLToCursor or CursorToXML. Using this, you may use namespaces, external references, validation against schema and so on. So I think this is the right way to address this issue, not those poor comands available in VFP.

Good luck!