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XQuery
book

XQuery

by Priscilla Walmsley
March 2007
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
21h 15m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XQuery

Predicates

Predicates are used in a path expression to filter the results to contain only nodes that meet specific criteria. Using a predicate, you can, for example, select only the elements that have a certain value for an attribute or child element, using a predicate like [@dept = "ACC"]. You can also select only elements that have a particular attribute child element, using a predicate such as [color], or elements that occur in a particular position within their parent, using a predicate such as [3].

The syntax of a predicate is simply an expression in square brackets ([ and ]). Table 4-6 shows some examples of predicates.

Table 4-6. Predicates (examples start with doc("catalog.xml")/catalog/)

Example

Meaning

product[name = "Floppy Sun Hat"]

All product elements that have a name child whose value is equal to Floppy Sun Hat

product[number < 500]

All product elements that have a number child whose value is less than 500

product[@dept = "ACC"]

All product elements that have a dept attribute whose value is ACC

product[desc]

All product elements that have at least one desc child

product[@dept]

All product elements that have a dept attribute

product[@dept]/number

All number children of product elements that have a dept attribute

If the expression evaluates to anything other than a number, its effective Boolean value is determined. This means that if it evaluates to the xs:boolean value false, the number 0 or NaN, a zero-length string, or the empty sequence, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006349Errata