I have an arbitrary XML document provided by a URL. I also have an xpath-like expressions. var xml = <doc><node1><node2><node3>some value</node3></node2></node1></doc>; var path = "node1.node2.node3"; I need to verify if the above path into the XML is valid. I tried to do this using eval and E4X. var value = eval("xml."+path); However, my actual xml document has namespaces which are getting in the way. I do not know the namespaces ahead of time or care what they are. Is there a way to strip all the namespaces out ahead of time? Is there a better way to do this? Thanks!