datamodel wrote:

> Hello I have an XML tree of which you can see a mini-version here:
> 
> http://paste.uni.cc/11838
> 
> (the tree is actually over 30,000 levels deep)

Thanks for pointing us to this data source.
I actually downloaded the original file here:

  http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/downloadtree.html

I was a bit disappointed by the crude quality
of this data.

xmllint --noout tolskeletaldump.xml 
tolskeletaldump.xml:25234: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
Bytes: 0xE9 0x6B 0x65 0x73
      EXTINCT="0" ID="66855"><NAME><![CDATA[Stichotrema sz?essyi]]></NAME></NOD
                                                          ^
Whoever created this data, he should insert
a proper XML header indictaing the encoding.

> How do I count the depth of a given <NODES><NODE> ?????

I am still interested in this XML file because it
is the only example of real-life data I ever saw
that claimed to contain 30,000 levels of depth.
Last year I created a synthetic file with 10,000
levels (for regression tests) and some people told
me that this is nonsense. They said that data with
so many levels never occur in real-life.

I am interested in using your file for regression tests.
Do you see any chance that your file will be supplied
in an updated and corrected form ?