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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T12:50:14+00:00

I am trying to get all the text in a node for a following

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I am trying to get all the text in a node for a following set and returning as one value (not multiple nodes).

<p>
   "I love eating out."
   <br>
   <br>
   "This is my favorite restaurant."
   <br>
   "I will definitely be back"
</p>

I am using ‘/p’ and get all the results but it returns with line breaks. Also trying ‘/p/text()’ results in getting each text between each tag as a separate returned value. The ideal return would be —

"I love eating out. This is my favorite restaurant. I will definitely be back"

I’ve tried searching other questions but couldn’t find something as close. Please not that in the current environment I am restricted to only use an XPath Query and cannot parse after or setup any HTML pre-parsing. Specifically I’m using the importXML function inside of Google Docs.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use:

    normalize-space(/)

    When this XPath expression is evaluated, the string value of the document node (/) is first produced and this is provided as argument to the standard XPath function normalize-space().

    By definition, normalize-space() returns its argument with the leading and trailing adjacent whitespace characters eliminated, and any interim such group of adjacent whitespace characters — replaced by a single space character.

    The evaluation of the above XPath expression results in:

    “I love eating out.” “This is my favorite restaurant.” “I will definitely be back”

    To eliminate the quotes, we additionally use the translate() function:

    normalize-space(translate(/,'&quot;', ''))

    The result of evaluating this expression is:

    I love eating out. This is my favorite restaurant. I will definitely be back

    Finally, to have this result wrapped in quotes itself, we use the concat() function:

    concat('&quot;',
       normalize-space(translate(/,'&quot;', '')),
       '&quot;'
       )

    The evaluation of this XPath expression produces exactly the wanted result:

    "I love eating out. This is my favorite restaurant. I will definitely be back"

    XSLT – based verification:

    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:value-of select=
   "concat('&quot;',
           normalize-space(translate(/,'&quot;', '')),
           '&quot;'
           )"/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

    When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document (corrected to be made well-formed):

    <p>
       "I love eating out."
       <br />
       <br />
       "This is my favorite restaurant."
       <br />
       "I will definitely be back"
</p>

    the XPath expression is evaluated and the result of this evaluation is copied to the output:

    "I love eating out. This is my favorite restaurant. I will definitely be back"
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