At 2012-04-13 19:09 +0000, David Lee wrote:
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XQuery constantly surprises me !
Today I was looking for a more concise way of testing if a string is
empty or blank.
The best I came up with is
empty($s) or $s eq ''
But empty($s) doesn't return true for an empty string, it returns
true for an empty sequence. If $s is defined as an empty string
you'll get false():
T:\ftemp>type lee.xq
let $s := ""
return empty($s)
T:\ftemp>xquery lee.xq
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>false
T:\ftemp>
If you know $s is a string then you can use not($s) to get true() for
the empty string (and for the empty sequence) because the effective
Boolean value of an empty string (and an empty sequence) is false().
or
string-length($s) eq 0
But along the way discovered this
if( () eq () ) then 1 else 2
if( () = () ) then 1 else 2
Returns 2 !!!
Of course in hindsight and fine-print its correct, but entirely
non-obvious to my eye ...
Just remember that the result is initialized as false() and
comparisons continue until one of the two operands is the empty set
or the comparison is true ... which happens right away because both
operands are the empty set.
I hope this helps.
. . . . . . . . Ken
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