Hello there

Remember for future questions to be as precise as you can, so that others can help you effectively (consider to read Understanding-and-Using-PerlMonks).

I humbly think that xpath are not intended to do match as in your case (child1, child2, child3..). I also think another design for your data will be better, if you can choice: all tag are 'child' and each one have a numerical 'id'.

In Perl there are many way to get the work done (and speaking about xml they are many * many.. see the poll), so I present a XML::Twig solution. Handlers are subs that are called during parsing, here you can use a normal Perl regex to filter unwanted results (i putted an 'ufo' in the xml data..).
use warnings;
use strict;
use XML::Twig;

my $xml=<<'XML';
<Root>
  <Parent>
    <child1>Child 1</child1>
    <child2>Child 2</child2>


    <child3>Child 3</child3>
    
    <ufo> Ufo there!</ufo>
  </Parent>
</Root>
XML


my $twig= new XML::Twig(
                          pretty_print => 'indented',
                          twig_handlers => { '/Root/Parent/*' => \&fie
+ld },
);

$twig->parse( $xml);

sub field
  { my( $twig, $field)= @_;
    return unless $field->gi() =~ /^child/i;
    $field->print;  #OR print $field->text();
 }

#OUTPUT
#
#    <child1>Child 1</child1>
#    <child2>Child 2</child2>
#    <child3>Child 3</child3>

[download]


Hth
L*
There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.

In reply to Re: XML dont include parent node by Discipulus
in thread XML dont include parent node by zak_s

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