In case mirod's suggestion doesn't pan out for you, here's an alternative that more or less follows your original idea of relocating the punctuation text relative to the footnote element.

(I also had some trouble getting my head around this -- realizing that the tree created by XML::Twig includes both objects that represent whole markup units and objects that hold the text content ((P)CDATA), if any, that precede and/or follow each whole markup unit. <update> For that matter, I still don't quite grok "get_xpath" -- but it looks like I got it working for this case.</update>)

I hope the example will be clear/easy enough for you to adapt to your particular needs. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use XML::Twig;

my @xmltst = ("<doc>Doc 1<a>Some text.<b>footnote text</b></a></doc>",
              "<doc>Doc 2<a>(More text.)<b>next footnote</b> QED</a></
+doc>",
              "<doc>Doc 3<a>\"More text?\"<b>3rd footnote</b></a><a> Q
+ED</a></doc>",
              "<doc>Doc 4<a>('More text!')<b>4th note</b> QED.</a><a>F
+inis.</a></doc>",
             );

for my $doc ( @xmltst ) {
    my $twig = XML::Twig->new();
    $twig->parse( $doc );
    my @b_elts = $twig->get_xpath('//b');
    print "\ndoc contains ",scalar @b_elts," footnotes:\n";
    $twig->print;
    for my $b ( @b_elts ) {
        my $prev = $b->prev_sibling;
        my $prev_text = $prev->text;
        if ( $prev_text =~ /([.,?!\)\"\']+)$/ ) {
            my $punct = $1;
            my $offset = length( $prev_text ) - length( $punct );
            if ( $b->next_sibling ) {
                my $next = $b->next_sibling;
                $prev->set_text( substr( $prev_text, 0, $offset ));
                $next->set_text( $punct . $next->text );
            }
            else {
                my $next = $prev->split_at( $offset );
                $next->cut;
                print "\n  created new elt containing: ".$next->text;
                $next->paste( 'after', $b );
            }
        }
    }
    print "\n   AFTER EDITING:\n";
    $twig->print;
    $twig->dispose;
    print "\n";
}

__OUTPUT__
doc contains 1 footnotes:
<doc>Doc 1<a>Some text.<b>footnote text</b></a></doc>
  created new elt containing: .
   AFTER EDITING:
<doc>Doc 1<a>Some text<b>footnote text</b>.</a></doc>

doc contains 1 footnotes:
<doc>Doc 2<a>(More text.)<b>next footnote</b> QED</a></doc>
   AFTER EDITING:
<doc>Doc 2<a>(More text<b>next footnote</b>.) QED</a></doc>

doc contains 1 footnotes:
<doc>Doc 3<a>"More text?"<b>3rd footnote</b></a><a> QED</a></doc>
  created new elt containing: ?"
   AFTER EDITING:
<doc>Doc 3<a>"More text<b>3rd footnote</b>?"</a><a> QED</a></doc>

doc contains 1 footnotes:
<doc>Doc 4<a>('More text!')<b>4th note</b> QED.</a><a>Finis.</a></doc>
   AFTER EDITING:
<doc>Doc 4<a>('More text<b>4th note</b>!') QED.</a><a>Finis.</a></doc>

[download]

(update: I realized, after posting this code, that it's bad form to use "$b" as a lexically-scoped scalar like this -- no harm done in this example, since I'm not using "sort", so I'll leave it as-is. But I should have known better.)

In reply to Re: Moving a tag within text with XML::Twig by graff
in thread Moving a tag within text with XML::Twig by skillet-thief

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