Extract text between tags with XPath including markup

Question

I have the following piece of XML: ``` ...In Tim Power: Politieman...... ``` I want to extract the part between the `` tags. For this I use XPath: ``` /span[@class="st"] ``` This however will extract everything including the ``. and. ``` /span[@class="st"]/text() ``` will return a list of two text elements. One containing "In Tim". The other ":Politieman". The `..` is not included and is handled like a separator. Is there a pure XPath solution which returns: ``` In Tim Power: Politieman... ``` EDIT Thanks to @helderdarocha and @TextGeek. Seems non trivial to extract plain text with XPath only including the ``. The /span[@class="st"]/node() solution creates a list containing the individual lines, from which it is trivial in Python to create a String.

Accepted Answer

To get any child node you can use: ``` /span[@class="st"]/node() ``` This will return: - Two child text nodes - The full `` node (element and contents). If you actually want all the `text()` nodes, including the ones inside `em`, then get all the `text()` descendants: ``` /span[@class="st"]//text() ``` or ``` /span[@class="st"]/descendant::text() ``` This will return three text nodes, the text inside ``, but not the `` elements.

Extract text between tags with XPath including markup

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