XPath / XQuery: find text in a node, but ignoring content of specific descendant elements

Question

I am trying to find a way to search for a string within nodes, but excluding ythe content of some subelements of those nodes. Plain and simple, I want to search for a string in

Answer 1

For the record, as a complement to the other answers, I've found this workaround that also seems to do the job:

//p[contains(child::text()|not(descendant::footnote), "text")]

Answer 2

I want to search for a string in paragraphs of a text, excluding the footnotes which are children elements of the paragraphs

An XPath 1.0 - only solution:

Use:

//p//text()[not(ancestor::footnote) and contains(.,'text')]

Against the following XML document (obtained from yours but added p s within a footnote to make this more interesting):

<document>
    <p n="1">My text starts here/</p>
    <p n="2">Then it goes on there
        <footnote>It's not a very long text!
           <p>text</p>
        </footnote>
    </p>
</document>

this XPath expression selects exactly the wanted text node:

My text starts here/

Answer 3

/document/p[text()[contains(., 'text')]] should do.

Answer 4

//p[(.//text() except .//footnote//text())[contains(., 'text')]]