Thanks, haukex and everyone else that responded. I am stuck with the xml output as it is produced by another application, Logos Bible Software. (concordance of various bible translations that I'm munging, then comparing against MS Office spellchecker to create custom dictionary files.)

I've made the change re: $xpc->find. Thanks for pointing that out; that makes sense.

The code works and this isn't a mission critical script so it shouldn't bother me, but it's still a little unclear and I hate that. But I've been writing some test scripts and some of it is starting to sync in. Thanks for confirming that I'm on the right path.