Ciaran S Duibhmn wrote:

 > Great, many thanks, that's exactly what I meant.
 >
 > However, on trying it out, I found that any newlines and indentation
 > within my <block> element contribute to the string_length, so that my
 > <block> is no longer 1 character long when they are present.
 >
 > So I would like to ask again, but this time: how to match any <block>
 > in which the sum of the lengths of the child <inline> elements is 1
 > character?  (My newlines and indentation will be outside any <inline>
 > element, but all the "content" is inside <inline> elements.)  Do I
 > need to program a loop somehow, or is there a handy function?

If you are using XPath 2.0 you can use string-length(string-join(inline,''))

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Piet van Oostrum
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