The present invention provides a fast and efficient way of processing structured data by utilizing an intermediate file to store the structural information. The structured data may be processed into a Binary mask Format (BMF) file which may serve as a starting point for post-processing. A tree structure built on top of the BMF file may be constructed very quickly, and also takes up less space than a Document Object Model (DOM) tree. Additionally, BMF records may reside entirely in the memory and contain structural information, allowing Simple API for XML (SAX)-like sequential data access.