[xquery-talk] Hashes

[Tim Finney]

Thank you all for your replies. I now see that XQuery can do what I want
already.

Tim Finney

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 20:31 -0400, Liam Quin wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 04:09:33PM -0400, Tim Finney wrote:
> > Sometimes I wish that XQuery had hashes:
> > 
> > Clunky XQuery 1.0 way:
> > 
> > if ($n = "a") then "aardvark"
> > else if ($n = "b") then "bandicoot"
> 
> As others have said, use XML to store structured data,
> 
> let $hash := <hash>
>   <value key="a">aardvark</value>
>   <value key="b">bandicoot</value>
> </hash>
> 
> and then,
>     $hash/hash/value[@key = "a"]
> 
> I always thought that XQuery should use this sort of thing for dates --
> $date/month, and so forth -- and that this would encourage implementations
> to do some smarter optimization for the case when people used XML to
> hold values in this way.  But oh well... maybe one day :-)
> 
> Liam
>