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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T00:09:04+00:00

assuming the following html (minus the comments and nbsp; etc that xQuery wont process

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assuming the following html (minus the comments and “nbsp;” etc that xQuery wont process as is) why does this following code work

for $first in fn:doc("file:///index.html")//element()[local-name() = "head"]
    return <test>{ $first }</test>

and this 

for $first in fn:doc("file:///index.html")//head
return 
<test>{ $first }</test>

not work?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Because index.html is XHTML and the <head> you are looking for is in the XHTML namespace.

    The first query ignores namespaces because you use the local-name() function.

    The second query does not, it explicitly asks for a <head> that is in the empty namespace.

    You would need

    declare namespace x="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

for $first in fn:doc("file:///index.html")/x:html/x:head
return <test>{ $first }</test>

    Note that I avoid using //, since this goes through the entire tree of the document, even though in this case the only possible position of the <head> is known beforehand. Making it explicit speeds up the XPath query a lot.

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