as easy as an xslt stylesheet

How many time have I read that sentence! It is also as easy as writing a piece of assembly code.

Did you have a look at the XML you get for a node? It is precisely the kind of XML that's very hard to process with XSLT. So please, if you are going to advocate using XSLT here, show us the (tested) code.

Now if you had said "as easy as writing xml_grep --text_only --cond 'field[@name="doctext"]' node.xml | perl -n -e'if( m{<code>}..m{<//code>}) { s{</?code>}{}g; print; }'", then that would have been OK (extra / added in <//code> to avoid confusing PM's code) . Apart from the fact that it looks like the XML for the homenode I tested it on (tye's) is invalid.