Chapter One
Sequence Expressions

One of the most notable innovations in XPath 2.0 is the ability to construct and manipulate sequences. This chapter is devoted to an explanation of the constructs in the language that help achieve this.

Sequences can consist either of nodes, or of atomic values, or of a mixture of the two. Sequences containing nodes only are a generalization of the node-sets offered by XPath 1.0. In the previous chapter we looked at the operators for manipulating node-sets, in particular, path expressions, and the operators «union», «intersect», and «except».

In this chapter we look at constructs that can manipulate any sequence, whether it contains nodes, atomic values, or both. Specifically, the chapter covers the following constructs:

Sequence concatenation operator: «,»

Numeric range operator: «to»

Filter expressions: «a[b]»

Mapping expressions: «for»

Quantif ... read full excerpt from XPathTM2.0 Programmer's Reference ebook