OK, so this looks very promising... in that you are using one of the XPaths that include attribute references. However, I don't understand if you wrote a code snippet to use this functionality, or what. Again, I'm very new to XML so forgive my ignorance. Why/what does adding 1: to //Party[@id=//Relation[child::RelationRoleCode@tc='37']/@RelatedObjectID]/Producer/CarrierAppointment/CompanyProducerID do? I understanding something to do with namespace, but I'm not really sure I understand what a namespace is? What I really would like to know, is there a way to use this XPath to directly access it's value with a perl statement? Although I'm beginning to understand a little, I still feel like I'm neck deep in mud! Again, thanks for all the ideas and insight!