G'day Ben,

Welcome to the monastery.

Short answer: I'm unable to reproduce your problem.

Longer answer:

I set up $qstat as a here-doc. I changed '... ?revision=1.11"' to 'revision="1.11"' and removed the other elision. Check that your original data (prior to replacing parts with '...') was actually valid XML.

Other than that, I used your code as written. The output was a lone "1" character as was expected from "<slots>1</slots>".

You actually don't need all those '->'s. I tried with the following code and got the same result.

for ($xml->{job_info}{queue_info}{'Queue-List'}('@')) {
    print $_->{job_list}{slots};
}
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I'm not a user of XML::Smart. I had to install this module, so I used the latest 1.79 version. Check that you're also using this or upgrade. Also check for any problems with your OS or Perl version (I'm using 5.18.1 on darwin-thread-multi-2level).

Here's the actual code and data I used for my tests (in the spoiler):