XPath to return string concatenation of qualifying child node values

Can anyone please suggest an XPath expression format that returns a string value containing the concatenated values of certain qualifying child nodes of an element, but ignoring others:

<div>
    This text node should be returned.
    <em>And the value of this element.</em>
    And this.
    <p>But this paragraph element should be ignored.</p>
</div>

The returned value should be a single string:

This text node should be returned. And the value of this element. And this.

Is this possible in a single XPath expression?

Thanks.

Solution 1:

In XPath 2.0 :

string-join(/*/node()[not(self::p)], '')

Solution 2:

In XPath 1.0:

You can use

/div//text()[not(parent::p)]

to capture the wanted text nodes. The concatenation itself cannot be done in XPath 1.0, I recommend doing it in the host application.

Solution 3:

/div//text()

double slash forces to extract text regardless of intermediate nodes

Solution 4:

This look that works:

Using as context /div/:

text() | em/text()

Or without the use of context:

/div/text() | /div/em/text()

If you want to concat the first two strings, use this:

concat(/div/text(), /div/em/text())