The thing is, there is no direct textual content in any of the FlowRater elements, so text() is empty, hence //OverallConnectionPoolStatus/FlowRater/text() won't return much.

//OverallConnectionPoolStatus/FlowRater/Name/text() OTOH, will indeed give you the contents of the Name elements, if you write, for example: print map { $_ } $section->findnodes( q{//OverallConnectionPoolStatus/FlowRater/Name/text()} );.

Thank you. I tried that. The returned output is again, as before, a syntax error:

error in xpath expression //OverallConnectionPoolStatus/FlowRater/Name
+/text() ar
ound text()  at D:\Scripts\prun84\test3.pl line 27
 at D:\Scripts\prun84\test3.pl line 8
 at D:\Scripts\prun84\test3.pl line 8
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You said it won't do much, but it shouldn't crash with an error if the expression will return nothing! I think there is a problem somehow with loading the XML::Twig::XPath module, somehow I believe I still using the XML::Twig engine. Can it be ? Just to make sure I attach the full program:

use XML::Twig::XPath;

my $t = XML::Twig::XPath->new( twig_roots   => 
        { 
            'BalancerStatus/WebServer/OverallConnectionPoolStatus' => 
+\&section,
            #'BalancerStatus/WebServer/BalancerStatus/Server' => \&sec
+tion
        }); 
$t->parsefile( 'localhost.xml');

#
sub section {
    my ($t, $section) = @_;
    my $a = $section->get_xpath( q{//OverallConnectionPoolStatus/FlowR
+ater/Name/text()} );
        
    $t->purge;
}
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Don't use get_xpath, use findnodes, as the docs state:

XML::Twig does not provide natively full XPATH support, but you can use "XML::Twig::XPath" to get "findnodes" to use "XML::XPath" as the XPath engine, with full coverage of the spec.

Actually the development version of XML::Twig produces the following message in that situation:

error in xpath expression //OverallConnectionPoolStatus/FlowRater/Name/text() around text() the expression is a valid XPath statement, and you are using XML::Twig::XPath, but you are using either 'find_nodes' or 'get_xpath' where the method you likely wanted to use is 'findnodes', which is the only one that uses the full XPath engine