Question

I would like to extract all text from subnodes of a specific document, AND return a text array. I think it would be easier to show it in an example:

given document:

<root>
    <div>
        some text
        <p>some other text</p>
    </div>

    <div>
        another text
        <b>yet another text <em>even more</em></b>
        end of text
    </div>
</root>

I would like to construct an expression which returns TWO elements:

 [0] some text someother text
 [1] another text yet another text even more end of text

I have tried many expressions but i seem to be missing something here, it is easy to extract div’s alone (just //div) but how to group them and join all text() subnodes in every div separately?

Answer 1

text() is your friend here:

You have to do this in two steps.

//div

then:

//text()

And then programmatically merge them.

XPath is a query language, just like CSS selectors and cannot transform things. All the functions (like normalize-text) are there to refine your selector not to modify the input itself.

See: how to get the normalize-space() xpath function to work?