Question

I am looking for an example of a XQuery that returns the xpath for each node found. So for example instead of getting the text() of each found node I would like to get the path() – but that function doesn’t seem to exist 🙂

I see now that the XPath 3.0 spec defines a path() function that would do what i want, but apparently this is new to 3.0

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-xpath-functions-30-20111213/#func-path

Answer 1

As Martin Honnen commented, the XPath expression selecting a specific node isn’t unique. For example, the second y element in the following document

<x>
  <y id="1"/>
  <y id="2"/>
</x>

could be selected (non-exclusively) by:

//y[2],
/x/y[2],
//*[@id = '2'],
/x/*[position() = last()]

If you are just interested in getting some XPath expression selecting the node, the FunctX XQuery Function Library contains two functions that do that:

• functx:path-to-node
  returns an XPath expression that selects all nodes with the same name and
  ancestor names as the node you evaluate it for.

  In our example it would return x/y for both y elements (mind the missing leading slash).

• functx:path-to-node-with-pos also includes the position of each ancestor in the document, thereby only selecting the node you pass in.

  In the example, the first y element would produce x/y[1] and the second one x/y[2].