Why following XPath statement returns all "a" elements?

Question

print $tree->findvalue('//a[1]');

I am using HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath in perl. Now i expect the above statment to return the value of second "a" element but instead it returns the value of all "a" elements in the page. I cant understand Why?

Answer 1

what you have shall return first a-child of every element.
so //a[1] will work as follows (result will be 2 nodes):

X
 Y
  a <-- give you this
  a
Z
 a <-- and this
 a

try (//a)[1] instead