[xquery-talk] effect of namespace on collection function; weird

Tue Feb 2 07:08:41 PST 2010

Can this possibly be right? After much debugging I have bolied a
really confusing bug down to this test case. The following query
prints 3097:

<html>
{
let $num := count(collection("/db/quotes")/quote)
return $num
}
</html>

and this query prints 0:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
{
let $num := count(collection("/db/quotes")/quote)
return $num
}
</html>

The only difference is the default namespace declaration. In the
documents being queried the quote elements are indeed in no namespace.
Is XQuery really supposed to be applying default namespaces to
unqualified names in path expressions? Do I report this as a bug in
the XQuery processor or do I scream at the insanity of the XQuery
working group?

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo at ibiblio.org