Oh XPATH

you are so cool.

require 'rubygems'
gem 'nokogiri'
require 'nokogiri'

xml = <<-EOXML
<doc>
  <p>
    <name>Pippo</name>
    <com>
      <type>phone</type>
      <value>12345</value>
    </com>
     <com>
      <type>fax</type>
      <value>67890</value>
    </com>
  </p>
</doc>
EOXML

doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml)
ps = doc.xpath('//p')

@p = ps.first
def take field
  @p.at_xpath("./com[type[text()='#{field}']]/value").text
end

puts "phone: #{take :phone}"
puts "fax:   #{take :fax}"

---

$ ruby nokogiri-xpath.rb 
phone: 12345
fax:   67890