Phantom wrote:
> Simple question that's driving me freakin mad.

Hard to answer without seeing your code -- are you working with XPath, 
or with the DOM, or with one of the other APIs/tools? Are you sure that 
whatever being returned doesn't need to be iterated over to retrieve the 
rest of the content?

In XPath, the string value of the fruits element is normally going to be 
  all text contained within it -- which will include the newlines:

"
  apple
  banana
  pear
"

If you had asked for the string value of /fruits/fruit, you would get 
"apple", since the string value of a multiple-node result is the string 
value of the first match. You'd need to iterate through the results to 
gather the other values, and of course concatenating them into a string 
would be your responsibility.

If you're using the simple DOM operations, elements don't have a string 
value; you must navigate the tree and gather the values. The DOM's XPath 
support, if present in your DOM, has an operation which will do the 
gather-and-concatenate operation -- but again, it's going to include the 
newlines.