Select an XML element regardless of level with XPATH

Question

I have this:

  
    text
  


  text

So I want

Answer 1

You are looking for the descendant axis:

the descendant axis contains the descendants of the context node; a descendant is a child or a child of a child and so on; thus the descendant axis never contains attribute or namespace nodes

In your case: /descendant:t

Of course, as others have answered, there is an abbreviated syntax for this:

// is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/. For example, //para is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/child::para and so will select any para element in the document (even a para element that is a document element will be selected by //para since the document element node is a child of the root node)