Thanks for this help. I have used that code and it seems to work but the specs have changed again (grrr users). I now need to exclude q tags with up to four different attribute values on them. So I tried:

'q[@supp != "yes" and @info != "yes" and @info != "info" and @implied != "yes"]'

but when I run the script with this in it I get an error message:

XML error:wrong condition 'q[@supp != "yes" and @info != "yes" and @info != "info" and @implied != "yes"]' at lib//handlers.pm line 1824

If I remove any two of the conditions the script runs again. Is there a limit to the number of conditions you can combine or have I made some stupid mistake?

The last option is entriely possible