# ... this is the part of the code I am trying to make work
my $xp;
# initialize parser object and parse the string
   $xp = XML::XPath->new( ErrorContext => 2 );

eval { $xp->parsefile( $open_this ); }; # $open_this is the xml file
 
# report any error that stopped parsing
if( $@ ) {
    $@ =~ s/at \/.*?$//s; # remove module line number
    print STDERR "\nERROR::: $open_this isn't well formated file:\n$@\n";
}
...