appending data to an xml file

[Peter Hansen]

Thomas Heller wrote:
> I want to append/insert additional data to an xml file.
[...]
> Better, imo, would be to add the dumped info into a proper xml tag, and
> inject it into the original file.  Is that (efficiently) possible?

My technique, when I can't just strip the root element and
have a document fragment consisting of a huge list of the
other elements, is just to seek to the end of the file,
back up to the beginning of the '</xml>', and begin overwriting
the file from that point... seems to work nicely, and in
most cases since I'm the one who wrote the file in the first
place I know that I've written '</xml>\n' and can just
seek to the end minus 8 bytes (when on Windows, anyway...).

-Peter