[xquery-talk] string manipulation

[Michael Kay]

> 
> In order to do what you want, you will need to use "fn:subsequence()":
> 
> string-join(subsequence(tokenize("book/title/author", "/"), 1, last() -
1), "/")

No, there's nothing here that changes the context, so the value of last() is
unrelated to the number of tokens returned by tokenize().

> 
> Instead of that, you could also try:
> 
> replace("book/title/author", "/.*?$", "")
> 

No, the "/" here will match the first "/" in the expression.

> 
> let $str := "book/title/author" return
> substring-before($str, concat("/", substring-after($str, "/")))
> 

No, this will return "book".

> I'm sure there are other good ways to acheive the result you want.

There are indeed.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/