Thanks guys , managed to get it working now.

use XML::LibXML;

my $file = $ARGV[0];
print $file."\n";
&parse($file);

sub parse {
my $filename = shift;
my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
my $doc    = $parser->parse_file("$filename");

  foreach my $node ($doc->findnodes('/root/node')) {
    print "textval :".$node->findnodes('./text()')->to_literal."\n";
  }
}
[download]

This does the trick. The particular data set I'm using should never have more than one text value mixed in with the child nodes.