have ">" or "<" in them. That's explained in the
XPath standard (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath).
"When neither object to be compared is a node-set and the operator is
= or !=,then the objects are compared by converting them to a common type as follows
and then comparing them. ..."
Thus "=" works.
But,
"When neither object to be compared is a node-set and the operator is
<=, <, >= or >,then the objects are compared by converting both objects to numbers and comparing
the numbers according to IEEE 754. ..."
Since the conversion(s) fail, the comparison returns false.
Lexicographic comparison of strings is not supported for the
<, >, <=, and >= operators!
The behavior you see is consistent with the standard and is
not a bug.
-Terry
Jonathan Mark wrote:
I am running into the following issue using Xindice from CVS: (my xalan file is xalan-2.4.0.jar).The operators <= >= > and < seem to always return false when applied to strings. For example if I add ["abc"<="abc"] to the end of an xpath query which returned some results, it now returns no results. An example of a failing query is: /db:datebook/db:category/db:date[string(db:start) = "2000-06-23 09:00"]["abc"<="abc"] The = operator works as expected, and the inequalities work as expected if applied to numbers rather than strings. (So appending ["abc"="abc"] or [5<=5] has no effect on the query result.) I have checked that the "<" and ">" signs are being quoted correctly when passed to the Xindice server over XML/RPC. Should I put this in bugzilla ... if so, for Xindice or Xalan? Or is it a known problem, or am I misunderstanding how it's supposed to work? many thanks, Jonathan Mark
