[Vtd-xml-users] XMLModifier remove all elements of type 'x'

[W K <wka...@ho...>]

I have the following xml snippet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<notes version="1.0">
    <note-count>5</note-count>
    <refs>
        <b id="1">
            <c id="1">
                <v id="2">
                    <note-id>1</note-id>
                    <note-id>2</note-id>
                    <note-id>5</note-id>
                </v>
            </c>
            <c id="4">
                <v id="2">
                    <note-id>1</note-id>
                    <note-id>2</note-id>
                    <note-id>3</note-id>
                </v>
            </c>
        </b>
        <b id="22">
            <c id="1">
                <v id="2">
                    <note-id>1</note-id>
                    <note-id>4</note-id>
                    <note-id>5</note-id>
                </v>
            </c>
        </b>
    </refs>
<notes>

I need to remove all elements: <note-id>1</note-id>

I have the following code snippet to remove all of the elements:
            XM.bind(VN);
            AutoPilot ap = new AutoPilot( VN );
            
            // find all note-id elements with a value of '1'
            String xpath = "//note-id[text()='1']";
            ap.selectXPath( xpath );
            
            int i = -1;
            while ( ( i = ap.evalXPath() ) != -1 ) {
                log.debug( "element/value: " + VN.toNormalizedString( VN.getCurrentIndex() ) + "/" + VN.toNormalizedString( VN.getText() ));
                 XM.remove();  
            }// while

If I just print out the xpath results, the element names and values are correct.  However, when trying to remove each value, I get the following error:

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1
    at com.ximpleware.FastLongBuffer.longAt(FastLongBuffer.java:309)
    at com.ximpleware.VTDNav.getTokenDepth(VTDNav.java:1327)
    at com.ximpleware.VTDNav.getElementFragment(VTDNav.java:1079)
    at com.ximpleware.XMLModifier.remove(XMLModifier.java:210)
    at com.razorphish.android.util.XmlUtil.deleteNoteIds(BibleNotesXmlUtil.java:633)
    at com.razorphish.android.test.XmlUtilTest.deleteNoteById(BibleNotesXmlUtilTest.java:146)
    at com.razorphish.android.test.XmlUtilTest.test(BibleNotesXmlUtilTest.java:49)

What is the best practice for removing these elements in bulk?

Thanks for any help you can provide.