[xquery-talk] string manipulation

[John Snelson]

Ryan Grimm wrote:
>> Unfortunatley, the predicate "[1 to last() - 1]" will not work, since 
>> the predicate only selects the node at the numeric position when given 
>> an expression that returns a /single/ numeric value. "1 to last() - 1" 
>> will return a sequence of numeric values.
> 
> The behavior you are describing for the expression "1 to last() - 1" is 
> exactly what I was looking for.  Putting this type of expression inside 
> of a predicate is something that I make heavy use of.  However, it 
> appears that it is something that not all xquery engines support.  Doing 
> this works perfectly well in Mark Logic but I just tested it using Saxon 
> and it does not work there.
> I checked out the spec and I can't find mention of this feature being 
> present but it makes for a very handy short form of subsequence().

The Mark Logic XQuery engine implements the May 2003 Working Draft of 
XQuery, and a lot has changed since then. The expression we are talking 
about is one of the things that has changed - the other XQuery engines 
you talk about seem to be specification complient in this respect.

John

-- 
John Snelson, Berkeley DB XML Engineer
Sleepycat Software, Inc
http://www.sleepycat.com

Contracted to Sleepycat through Parthenon Computing Ltd
http://blog.parthcomp.com/dbxml