Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : DomParser AND serialize

I am trying to write an operation that does the following:

1. export dxl from a database
2. convert dxl to dom
3. loop through nodes, and change nodeValue depending on nodeName
4. import dxl to a database (preferably an existing one).

I realize there are some other steps that are involved in doing the above. I realize that I must:

create a string from the stream of dxl generated from the exporter to create the domparser object.

this stream must be formatted in the correct characterset.

when this stream is fed into the domparser, i must rebuild and output the dxl, node by node, as I am looping through it.

<this is where I am having trouble.. i simply don't know how to format the output so that it will be properly formatted dxl in the end>

so.. I tried to serialize the domparser output, but this, no matter what i do, gives me a file much larger than the original dxl i put in. i have tried a number of charactersets, ASCII & UTF-8. it also fails on the import with an error msg stating that there is a missing "="

Does anyone have any advice for me??
Thanks.
T

i will paste my code in a response to this doc.