Thank you Ken for the pointers to the docs. Your assessment of my trying variations is close; I'm a slow learner, new to xml (and not strong on perl), and was getting desperate. That documentation will be my friend for the remaining tasks!

Fwiw the change of quoting you suggested doesn't actually fix my mistake. My error was misunderstanding of the result that xpath '//matrix/vm@type="br"' matches, so as pointed out in the comment above I was wrongly adding an extra 'vm' child level in findvalue("./vm/release/\@version").

In reply to Re^2: xpath problem using XML::LibXML by anadem
in thread xpath problem using XML::LibXML by anadem

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