[xquery-talk] XHTML namespace and doc() function

Wed Jul 7 15:15:02 PDT 2004

> 	default element namespace = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
> 
> 	<html>
> 	 <head><title>Test</title></head>
> 	 <body>
> 	 { doc("DPM0029.xml")//body//p }
> 	 </body>
> 	</html>
> 
> and discovered the problem that the doc() function here returns null

Are you sure the doc() function is returning the empty sequence? 
(There's actually no nulls in XQuery, just empty sequences).  You can 
check what doc's doing with count(doc("DPM0029.xml")) and see if it 
returns 1.

I bet doc() is returning the doc but it's the //body//p that's returning 
empty due to namespace mismatches on those path steps.  The fix is to 
declare the namespace e = "" and use //e:body to look for a body in no 
namespace.

BTW, a quick test you can use if you're having namespace problems is to 
try //*:body//*:p which matches any namespace.  That's probably slower 
in production on indexed engines, but good for a quick test.

-jh-