Question

Consider a query

//item[value='testvalue']/ancestor::container[1]

if item appears several times inside a container then we have several hits that supposedly should appear several times in the results. The results are nodes, right? So if I apply distinct-values to them they would stop being nodes and the function would technically return values losing positional information. But is there operation (refactoring, function) that allows to keep “noded” result while at the same time exclude duplicate hits?

Answer 1

is there operation (refactoring, function) that allows to keep “noded”
result while at the same time exclude duplicate hits?

By definition the XPath operator / performs deduplication, therefore:

//item[value='testvalue']/ancestor::container[1] 

doesn’t select two identical nodes.