Solved!
in case someone needs to use this approach in future
I solved this by using 2 for loops. one will get the text value from the element of interest and the other loop will match the node by using the following xpath
findnodes("//id/phone[Number=$node]")
this will get the node itself containing the text of interest. As $node contains the txt from my previous xpath

In reply to Re^3: print specific XML node number by zak_s
in thread print specific XML node number by zak_s

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