Question

How do I find/use op:except with the multiple xml files?

I’ve gotten the nodes from file 1 and file 2, and in the xquery expression I’m tring to find the op:except of those two. When I use op:except, I end up getting an empty set.

XML File 1:

<a>txt</a>
<a>txt2</a>
<a>txt3</a>

XML File 2:

<a>txt2</a>
<a>txt4</a>
<a>txt3</a>

I want output from op:($nodesfromfile1, $nodesfromfile2) to be:

<a>txt</a>

Answer 1

It effectively comes down to the single line behind the return in the following code. You could put that in a function if you like, but it is already very dense, so maybe not worth it..

let $file1 := (
    <a>txt</a>,
    <a>txt2</a>,
    <a>txt3</a>
)
let $file2 := (
    <a>txt2</a>,
    <a>txt4</a>,
    <a>txt3</a>
)
return
    $file1[not(. = $file2)]

Note, you also have the ‘except’ keyword ($file1 except $file2), but that works on node identity which won’t work if the nodes comes from different files.

By the way, above code uses string-equality for comparison. If you would prefer to do a comparison on full node-structure, you could also use the deep-equal() function.

HTH!