[xquery-talk] Query with subelements nested inside words

[eah at faust.ab.ca]

Greetings all,

I have a problem with an XQuery I'm trying to get working.

Here is a sample of the kind of XML I'm working with:

<root>
  <elemt>Something is ro<lig>tt</lig>en in the state of
<emph>Den</emph>mark</elemt>
</root>

I would like to be able to extract the contents of <elemt> as a string
without the subelements and with the integrity of the words
unaffected...for example:

<result>
  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
</result>

I have tried various approaches with XQuery along the lines of...

for $TheResult in (/root/elemt) return normalize-space($TheResult)

...but the best I've been able to do is this:

<result>
  Something is ro tt en in the state of Den mark
</result>

As you can see, spaces are being inserted in undesirable locations.

Any ideas as to how I can make this work in XQuery?

thanks!
e.