Thanks a lot! Much more efficient than the alternative xml_io_tools (although open source would of course be nice). However, it completely messes up character arrays. If you create an array with a char() function that consists of e.g. four character strings (size 4 x 400), the corresponding XML output is nonsense. On the other hand, writing separate lines as items creates a problem for other software which reads my XML files. There should be an option to concatenate array elements together in the XML file, rather than writing them out as separate 'item' elements.