use warnings; use strict; use Data::Dumper; use XML::LibXML; my $parser = XML::LibXML->new; my $doc = $parser->parse_file( 'practice.xml' ); my $xpath = '/quotelist/quotation[@id="q5"]/source/text()'; my $result = $doc->find( $xpath ); print Dumper $result->string_value; exit 0;