[OSM-newbies] Planet data in more compact format?

[Kelly Jones]

I've previously downloaded and bunzip2'd (or at least bzcat'd)
planet-latest.osm.bz2.

It's great and complete, but has many unnecessary characters (eg, XML tags).

Is there a compacter version of this information? My goal is to create
an SQLite db, so I only need the raw data w/ minimal formatting/XML.

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