In XPath how to select the element content

Question

Is there a way of writing an XPath expression to select the content of the element.

e.g.

<Element>xxx</Element>

Assuming I can write XPath (/Element) to get Element how do I tweak the XPath to get xxxx returned rather than the Element wrapper?

EDIT/ANSWER

To do this in dom4j world use the Element.valueOf(String xpathExpression) rather than the .selectXXX() methods.

Solution 1

Use the value-of element:

<xsl:value-of select="/Some/Path/To/Element"/>

If you can only specify an XPath then use the text function like this:

/Some/Path/To/Element/text()

Solution 2

A bit too late but...

data(Element)

...should also be fine.

Comments

[Mike Q]

Thanks but I just want an XPath expression. I'm not using XSLT, just dom4j with jaxen inside Java code.

[Mike Q]

Ah, it turns out in dom4j that text() returns a DefaultText element. However I found a function in dom4j called valueOf(XPath xpath) that does exactly what your first example does (String representation of XPath result) so that worked nicely. Thanks again.

[reinierpost]

How can this answer be the accepted and most upvoted one when it doesn't use XPath to extract the content? it answers a different question.

[reinierpost]

Not for me. I don't know what you're using, but data is not a standatd XPath function.