OK, so one more problem I don't understand.. and I think it's more my lack of understanding about HASHES. I was getting an error on the my $value = $nodes[0]->text; statement indicating Can't call method "text" on an undefined. So, I thought I could use if (@node[0]) { my $value = $nodes[0]->text; } else { $value = "EMPTY_STRING"; } but now everything comes back as if the variable is undefined. How do I determine if a hash is undefined?

@node is a different variable than @nodes.

Also, hashes are accessed through $hash->{ key } not through $hash->key. Maybe see perldsc or perlreftut.

You should really have this near the top of your program to enable Perl to tell you when you mistype variable names:

use strict;
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Variables declared with my inside a block { .. } are not accessible outside the block. You probably want something like

sub get_xpath_value {
   my ($xpath) = @_;   
   my @nodes = $root->findnodes($xpath);
   
   my ($name,$value); # declare outside block
   if (defined $nodes[0]) {
     $value = $nodes[0]->text; # still accessible inside block
     $name  = $nodes[0]->getName;
   } else {
     $value = 'not defined'; # or whatever you want
     $name  = 'not defined';
   }
   return ($name,$value); 
}
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poj

That makes sense now..