XPath to return default value if node not present

Question

Say I have a pair of XML documents

    
    mystring

and

Answer 1

@Alejandro provided the best XPath 1.0 answer, which has been known for years, since first used by Jeni Tennison almost ten years ago.

The only problem with this expression is its shiny elegance, which makes it difficult to understand by not only novice programmers.

In a hosted XPath 1.0 (and every XPath is hosted!) one can use more understandable expressions:

string((/Foo/Baz | $vDefaults[not(/Foo/Baz/text())]/Foo/Baz)[last())

Here the variable $vDefaults is a separate document that has the same structure as the primary XML document, and whose text nodes contain default values.

Or, if XSLT is the hosting language, one can use the document() function:

 

 
    
        
        not-found
  
 

 
     
 

Or, not using concat():

 

 
    
        
        not-found