Hi

There was something wrong with you example XML, the MyImportantNode elements were closed before defining the attributes.

Assuming that was an error in posting, I think that your confusion comes from a number of reasons:

In 1 it is something to do with the way you are chaining findnodes and string_value. If you replace it with:

    say "[1a]" . $nodeybits->findvalue('//@GeneralID');
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you'll get Random1Random2Random3. If you want to deal with each value, you'll need a loop:

    say "[1b]" . $_->findvalue('.') 
            foreach $nodeybits->findnodes('*/@GeneralID');
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Having said that, it's a bit confusing that you're using nodeybits (the MiddleTag node) but then running XPath expressions beginning with "//", which will start at the root.

2 does what I'd expect, given the above: the first tag that matches that will be the root element, and calling string_value on that will return the entire text of the file.

The remaining ones are all because you're using $nodeybits. This is not an XPathContext object. For the examples you've given, you could use $xpc. But presumably this is cut down from a bigger program where you're doing XPath relative to the node you're looking at in the loop.

EDIT see ikegami's reply

my $inner_xpc = XML::LibXML::XPathContext->new($nodeybits);
$inner_xpc->registerNs( theNS => 'http://www.wow.com/BlahML');
# [3]
print $inner_xpc->findnodes('//theNS:CannotGetTagA')->string_value . "
+\n";
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Worked for me and you could use $inner_xpc for your remaining queries, being careful to be consistent about using the namespace prefix (in 5, you have theNS:RootTag but miss it off for all the other element names).

HTH

FalseVinylShrub