On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 02:16:33PM -0000, Rick Quatro rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx scripsit:
[snip]
> title/text()
> 
> I get a sequence of text nodes. What I really want is a single string:
> 
> 1914-1918 - World War One

title/normalize-space() should do it.  (But might have trouble if there
are two processing instructions with a space between them in the middle
of a word, or something like that.)

It can often be better to use the identity transform first to delete all
the processing instructions and get text node merging to fix nigh-all of
the line break problem before doing the main processing.

-- Graydon