<p>I invested some time into learning R and would prefer not to learn Python or Ruby just for convenience of parsing XML.</p>

<p>I am not a pro R programmer so I need a higher level library then XML package of R.
getNodeSet and XPath is very hard to use.</p>

There are at least four packages (I haven't tried any of them) I found on <a href="http://crantastic.org">crantastic.org</a>:

 - [RNCBIAxis2Libs](http://crantastic.org/packages/RNCBIAxis2Libs)
 - [RNCBIEUtilsLibs](http://crantastic.org/packages/RNCBIEUtilsLibs)
 - [NCBI2R](http://crantastic.org/packages/NCBI2R)
 - [RNCBI](http://crantastic.org/packages/RNCBI)