If you cannot see the code in my original post let me know. I will repost the information. I have not tried the XPath (Rule/*/text()) or the local-name() function? Can you give me an example of how I would modify my code to try those? Thanks!

I can see the code and data samples, but I was not able to understand what exactly you are trying to achieve. For example, the following script processes both the input files (enhanced by the namespace declarations). I do not see any issue with the namespace - what exactly do you want to do with the elements in the dc namespace?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use XML::LibXML;

my $xpc = 'XML::LibXML::XPathContext'->new;
$xpc->registerNs(x  => 'http://checklists.nist.gov/xccdf/1.1');
$xpc->registerNs(dc => 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1');

for my $file (glob '*.xml') {
    print "# $file:\n";
    my $string;
    my $xml = 'XML::LibXML'->load_xml(location => $file);
    $string .= $_ for $xpc->findnodes('/x:Group/x:Rule/x:check/x:check
+-content/text()',
                                      $xml->documentElement);
    print "$string\n";
}
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لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

I understand now. The code you posted does what I have been doing. It goes directly to the <check-content> node and pulls that data. If there is more than one instance of <check-content> under <Rule> then they are pushed into 2 spaces in the array. I am trying to pull the node(s) <check-content> and if there is more than one, combine them into one string. I need to be able to pull the section <Rule> </Rule> and then parse that section to pull the <check-content> nodes. That is the only way I could think of to pull those nodes and then combine them before pushing the data into an array. I can pull directly from the <check-content> node using the default namespace without issue, but if I back up to "Rule" in order to grab all instances of <check-content> under that Rule it includes the <reference> section that has a different namespace and bombs out. I need some way to tell it to pull the node with the other (dc) namespace also, or to ignore it and pull everything that has the default namespace.