I was not aware of "count(preceding-sibling)" function ,your code just worked fine. I tried google what are the different option available in LibXML but could not find can u help me on that. If wanted the output some thing like VAL1,NAME,0 VAL1,NAME1,0 VAL2,NAME,0 VAL2,NAME1,0

Forget google, start with the docs, XML::LibXML: This module is an interface to libxml2, providing XML and HTML parsers with DOM, SAX and XMLReader interfaces, a large subset of DOM Layer 3 interface and a XML::XPath-like interface to XPath API of libxml2.

Next the libxml2 docs: Libxml2 includes complete XPath, XPointer and XInclude implementations.

Now my tips

xpather.pl / examples(for tree-xpath and others)/walkthroughs/tutorials ...

This tutorial needs javascript http://zvon.org/comp/r/tut-XPath_1.html

Simple online XPath tester

Hi:)