Use this XML input,

<div>
<span>abc</span>
defg
<br/>
hijkl
<br/>
mnop
<span>qrs</span>
tuvw
<br/>
xyz
</div>

XPath expression/div/span[1]/following-sibling::text()Returns the 5 sibling text nodes after the first element: defg, hijkl, mnop, tuvw, and xyz, each node starts and ends with a newline character.

XPath 1.0 expression normalize-space(/div/span[1]/following-sibling::text()) will return defg, with no leading or trailing whitespace, As an argument to normalize-space(), convert it to a string by returning the string value of the node in the node set that is in document order It's the first.

In XPath 2.0 and later, select the first item in the sequence, for example:
normalize-space((/div/span[1]/following-sibling::text())[1]), this also works in XPath 1.0.