Re: Matching the first text element in a subtree

oXygen complains that "Axis in pattern must be child or attribute", meaning presumably that only element nodes, not text nodes, can be selected using this axis.

No, it means what it says. You can use "//" in a pattern, but you can't use
the descendant axis, or any axis other than "child" or "attribute". It's an
irritating restriction when you hit it, but it doesn't come up sufficiently
often to have been fixed in 2.0.

Can anyone suggest how to go about selecting the first text node which is a descendant of the p tag?

In 2.0:

p//text()[. is ancestor::p[1]/descendant::text()[1]]

In 1.0:

p//text()[generate-id(.) =
generate-id(ancestor::p[1]/descendant::text()[1])]

That works great -- it's exactly what I need. The whitespace issue isn't
a problem -- I stupidly pretty-printed my example without thinking,
trying to clarify the structure, but the original documents are clean.

Cheers,
Martin

But most people, I think, end up doing the work at the apply-templates level
rather than in the match pattern.

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