Yes, it returns plain text because the textContent method is documented as:

this function returns the content of all text nodes in the descendants of the given node as specified in DOM. (perldoc XML::LibXML::Node)

Data::Dumper won't be much use with XML::LibXML. Nodes are all just numeric pointers to structures at the other side of the XS boundary (i.e. C structures). There is XML::LibXML::Debugging which allows, e.g.

  print Dumper( $xml->toDebuggingHash );

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perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^3: extracting data from HTML by tobyink
in thread extracting data from HTML by Jurassic Monk

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