> <xsl:variable name="path" select="//level1/level2" />

path is not an expression type in xpath, you can not store unevaluated
expressions in a variable (no more than you can in most other
programming languages) so that variable stores the node set resulting
from evaluating that path at the current node.


> <xsl:value-of select="$docdataXML/$path"/>
 
As the value of $path is a constant, this is the same as

<xsl:value-of select="$path"/>

David

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