I do. I get

Can't locate object method "getFirstChild" via package "XML::LibXML::NodeList"

from my test script.

XML::LibXML::NodeList isn't XML::LibXML::Node.

You are probably using findnodes in scalar context.

my @nodes = $doc->findnodes(...);  # Return all matching nodes
my $nodes = $doc->findnodes(...);  # Ditto, as a NodeList
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If you want the first match node, call findnodes in list context.

my ($node) = $doc->findnodes(...);  # Get first matching node.
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If you want to visit every matching node, the following is probably more what you want:

for my $node ($doc->findnodes(...)) {
   ...
}
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That was it... I had my context wrong for the findnodes function:

Old:

my $status = $dom->findnodes("...");
my $msg = $dom->findnodes("...");
.
.
print $status->getFirstChild()->data, "\n";
print $msg->getFirstChild()->data, "\n";
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New:

my ($status) = $dom->findnodes("...");
my ($msg) = $dom->findnodes("...");
.
.
print $status->getFirstChild()->nodeValue(), "\n";
print $msg->getFirstChild()->nodeValue(), "\n";
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Thanks, everyone, for all the help.

You're presumably calling it on the wrong object type.  What does your code/xml look like?

Here's a simple example using getFirstChild that works:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::LibXML;

my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
my $doc = $parser->parse_fh(\*DATA);

for my $elem ( $doc->getElementsByTagName('foo') ) {
    my $val = $elem->getFirstChild()->nodeValue();

    print "$val\n";   # Foo1 Foo2
}  

__DATA__
<?xml version = "1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<doc>
  <foo>Foo1<bar>Bar</bar></foo>
  <foo>Foo2</foo>
</doc>
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http://search.cpan.org/grep?cpanid=PAJAS&release=XML-LibXML-1.70&string=getfirstchild&i=1&n=1&C=0