That worked. I thought that 8000 was the limit for a varchar variable.

Thanks a lot and happy new year

Thanks a lot for you response.

I thought about this but it will be a problem for me since the XML i am using is longer than 8000 characters

Thanks mister.magoo

I tried this but no success

WITH XMLNAMESPACES(DEFAULT 'b')

select

tab.col.value('c[1]', 'NVARCHAR(100)') AS Country1

from

@xml.nodes('/a/b')tab(col)