Question

Is there an exclusive OR ‘XOR’ in XPath1.0 ?

Answer 1

Use this XPath 1.0 expression:

x and not(y)   or   y and not(x)

Always try to avoid the != operator, because it has an unexpected meaning/behavior when one or both of its arguments are node-sets.

In XSLT 2.0 or XQuery 1.0 one can write this as a function and then use just the function in any XPath expression. Below is an XSLT 2.0 function definition for xor and a small example of using this function:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
 xmlns:f="my:f">
 <xsl:output method="text"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:sequence select=
  "for $x in (true(), false()),
       $y in (true(), false())
     return
       ('xor(', $x, ',', $y,') = ', f:xor($x, $y), '&#xA;')
  "/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:function name="f:xor">
  <xsl:param name="pX" as="xs:boolean"/>
  <xsl:param name="pY" as="xs:boolean"/>

  <xsl:sequence select=
   "$pX and not($pY)   or   $pY and not($pX)"/>
 </xsl:function>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when this transformation is applied on any XML document (not used), the wanted, correct result is produced:

 xor( true , true ) =  false
 xor( true , false ) =  true 
 xor( false , true ) =  true 
 xor( false , false ) =  false