XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition

Chapter 10. XPath: 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 XPath 2.0 operators for manipulating sets of nodes, 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»

• Simple mapping expressions: «/» applied to atomic values

• Quantified expressions: «some» and «every»

First, some general remarks about sequences.

Sequences (unlike nodes) do not have any concept of identity. Given two values that are both sequences, you can ask (in various ways) whether they have the same contents, but you cannot ask whether they are the same sequence.

Sequences are immutable. This is part of what it means for a language to be free of side effects. You can write expressions that take sequences as input and produce new sequences as output, but you can never modify an existing sequence in ...