How to exclude child nodes with XPath selector?

Question

I have the following HTML fragment:

 
 
   text
 

 
 text 
 ...
 

        

      

Answer 1

XPath is for selection, not for transformation. (XSLT is for transformation.)

You can select div elements that do not contain certain a elements only if the div elements already exist in the input document; you cannot select div elements and then remove child elements once selected.