You can use a vertical bar (|) instead of a # to indicate that you do not want the entire document. Instead, you want only the part of the document referenced by the XPointer. For example:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-
19980210.xml|xptr(id("ebnf"))
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-
19980210.xml|xptr(descendant::language[position()=2])
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210.xml|ebnf
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-
19980210.xml|
xptr(/child::spec/child::body/child::*/child::language[ position() = 2])
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-
19980210.xml|/1/14/2
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-
19980210.xml|xptr(id("ebnf"))xptr(id("EBNF"))