RE: text() handling

> Question: does the function text() return a boolean or the text of the
> node?

text() is not a function, it is a node test. Node tests are used within an
axis step such as child::text() to indicate the kind of node that you want
to select. In this example (which can be abbreviated to "text()", because
the child axis is the default) you are selecting all the text nodes of the
context node.

The result of an axis step is a set of nodes. If you use it in a boolean
context, the result is true if the node-set contains at least one node. If
you use it in a string context, the result (in XPath 1.0) is the string
value of the first node in the node-set, in document order.

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