Consider the following XSLT template

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:variable name="var1">
        <elem>1</elem>
        <elem>2</elem>
        <elem>3</elem>
    </xsl:variable>
    <xsl:text>var1 has </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="count($var1)"/>
    <xsl:text>elements.
    </xsl:text>

    <xsl:variable name="var2" select="$var1/elem[. != '2']"/>
    <xsl:text>var2 has </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="count($var2)"/>
    <xsl:text>elements.
    </xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

The output of this template is

var1 has 1 elements
var2 has 2 elements

The first line outputs 1 (and not, as I first expected 3) because var1 is a document fragment that contains the <elem> elements as childen. Now for my questions:

How can I create a variable that does not contain a document fragment? I could do it like I did with var2, only leaving out the predicate. But maybe there is a way without using a second variable. Or, as an alternative: How can I preserve the document fragment in a variable while filtering out some elements?