How to get all streaming text content in XML using XPath

XPath 1.0

You cannot do concatenation of all text descendants of a given node in XPath 1.0. You can select nodes in XPath,

/TEXT/DESCR//text()

      

        
        
        
      

    

but then you have to do the concatenation in the hosting language.

In PHP:

$xml = '<TEXT>
    <DESCR>
         Here is the first part...
         <PLUS>The second</PLUS>
         And the third
    </DESCR>
</TEXT>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($xml);
$x= new DOMXpath($dom);
foreach($x->query("/TEXT/DESCR//text()") as $node) echo trim($node->textContent); 

      

        
        
        
      

    

Will output the result you requested:

Here is the first part...The secondAnd the third

      

        
        
        
      

    

[Otherwise, unless you have any other reason to iterate over the text nodes, replace the loop foreach

above:]

$xml = '<TEXT>
    <DESCR>
         Here is the first part...
         <PLUS>The second</PLUS>
         And the third
    </DESCR>
</TEXT>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($xml);
$x= new DOMXpath($dom);
echo str_replace(PHP_EOL, '', $x->evaluate('normalize-space(/TEXT/DESCR)'));

      

        
        
        
      

    

What gives:

Here is the first part... The second And the third

      

        
        
        
      

    

XPath 2.0

You can concatenate all text descendants of a given node in XPath 2.0:

string-join(/TEXT/DESCR//text(), '')