> The example I gave represents an HTML document that I've no 
> control over, each node is a text node and I was hoping to 
> get the entire text string, minus the text contained in child 
> node 'c'. Is it somehow possible to iterate all nodes within 
> a specific path and concatenate their text content? 
> Conditional on the node not being 'c' ? I've read about a few 
> of the string functions but it's a little beyond me to figure 
> out at the moment.

In XPath 2.0 that's something like 

string-join((/document/a//text() except /document/a//c/text()), "")

Offhand I'd say that it can't be done in XPath 1.0. But I think you're
stretching XPath anyway - you should be thinking about using XSLT or XQuery.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/