Exclude specific tag from selection in XPath

Question

I know this is a simple question, but I can't figure it out. Consider the following simple XML document:

<root>
  <a></a>
  <b></b>
  <c></c>
  <a></a>
  <d></d>
  <e></e>
  <a></a>
  <a></a>
</root>

What's the best way to select the nodes <b> through <e> using XPath?

I'm looking for something like

/root/*[not(a)]

(which does not do the trick)

Answer 1

/root/*[not(self::a)] 

Answer 2

Answering to add that in XPath 2.0, you can use except:

/root/(* except a) 

For XPath 1.0, Tomalak pointed out, this is the standard way to do it:

/root/*[not(self::a)] 

By the way, if someone lands here trying to use this in XSLT 2.0 in a xsl:template/@match attribute it won't work because @match takes patterns which although look like XPath expressions, are not XPath expressions. The solution for XPath 1.0 would work in this case.

Answer 3

I realize this is an old question, but I recently ran into a similar problem and used the following xpath to solve it:

/root/*[not(name()='a')]