Question

If I have several Section elements in an XML document, what XQuery do I use to get a list of all the name values?

<Section name='New Clients' filePath='XNEWCUST.TXT' skipSection='False'> 

Answer 1

In XPath 2.0 (which is a subset of XQuery) one would use the following expression to get a sequence of all string values of the ‘name’ attributes of the ‘Section’ elements:

for $attr in //Section/@name  return string($attr) 

Do note that using the ‘//’ abbreviation is typically a bad practice as this may require a whole (subtree) to be traversed. In any case where the structure of the document is known a more specific XPath expression (such as one using specific location steps) should be preferred.