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I don't work with XML often enough to have this always at the ready, so: normalize-space() will take care of chomping sequences of whitespace to a single space. So when you're trying to match something like:

<p>This is my
Great Page Number Three
summary
</p>

You can just use something like this and it will do the right thing (using dom4j if that matters):

 String path = "//p[contains( normalize-space( text() ), 'This is my Great Page Number' )]";
 List matching = doc.selectNodes( path );

(...and when I say 'XPath function' I actually mean 'XSLT function also used by XPath'. But since I'm just using XPath right now...)