Re: [xsl] XPath - excluding specified childNodes from result nodeList

[Steven <gatecrasher1981@xxxxxxxxx>]

> XPath expressions return a set of nodes from the original tree. They can't
> modify the tree in any way. The <a> node in your document has a <c> child,
> and there is nothing any XPath expression can do to change that. The
> expression /document/a doesn't actually include either the b or c elements
> in its result set, but the a that it returns is the original a, with its
> children intact.

Thanks for the replies all. I suspected something like this might be
the case based on my research and feable attempts but I was hoping
failure thus far was down to my XPath nievity, thanks for clarifying.

I was hoping to solve the problem just using XPath rather than
performing an operations on the result, maybe there is another
solution?

The example I gave represents an HTML document that I've no control
over, each node is a text node and I was hoping to get the entire text
string, minus the text contained in child node 'c'. Is it somehow
possible to iterate all nodes within a specific path and concatenate
their text content? Conditional on the node not being 'c' ? I've read
about a few of the string functions but it's a little beyond me to
figure out at the moment.

Thanks again.

Steven