Here's my go. It recursively builds a list of "ancestors" for each node using $h->lineage. The $h->objectify_text allows text nodes to have ancestors too. When it finds any matching text it prints out the list. 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $h = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content(
  do{local $/;<DATA>},
);
$h->objectify_text;

my $text = q{text};
walk($h, $text);

sub walk{
  my $h = shift;
  my $text = shift;
  for my $ele ($h->content_list) {
    my @lineage = $ele->lineage;
    my @ancestors;
    for my $ancestor (reverse @lineage){
      push @ancestors, $ancestor->tag;
    }
    if (
      $ele->tag eq q{~text}
        and
      $ele->attr(q{text})
        and
      $ele->attr(q{text}) eq $text
    )
    {

      printf(
        qq{%s\t}, 
        $_
      ) for @ancestors;

      printf(
        qq{found *%s* at depth %s\n}, 
        $ele->attr(q{text}), 
        scalar @ancestors
      );

    }
    walk($ele, $text);
  }
}

__DATA__
<html><head><title>search</title></head>
<body>
<p>text</p>
<div>
<p>text</p>
</div>
</body></html>

[download]
html    body    p    found *text* at depth 3
html    body    div    p    found *text* at depth 4

[download]

In reply to Re: Finding the DOM element via text search by wfsp
in thread Finding the DOM element via text search by wbushey

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