>Do you mean to say that we need to give >prefix to the default namespace in the input xml file?
No, the input XML has already assigned the elements to a namespace. In a path expression, the element names must be assigned to that same namespace in order to match. But in an XPath 1.0 expression, you can't have a default (i.e., assumed) namespace for element names, meaning that a prefix is the only way to set the namespace on an element name in the expression. See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-nmspace.html http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-nmspace2.html for more extensive information about namespaces. .................David Marston
