Hi,

Basically I want to break down the path-expression of a node in my XML into its elementary steps.

QName: “Q{http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions}root()/Q{}A[1]/Q{}B[1]/Q{}C[1]/Q{}D[1]” must become QName-sequence: (“Q{http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions}root()”, ”Q{}A[1] ”, ”Q{}B[1] ”, ”Q{}C[1] ”, ”Q{}D[1]”)

So I need to break the path-expression down on the “/”-characters which aren’t part of the namespace-uries.

I’m using the “fn:tokenize”-function for this. The function uses a “regular expression” for it’s separator.

Unfortunately my regex-experience is zero (well, two days by now). I came up with the next brilliant ;-) solution:  fn:tokenize( path( $node), “/(?=Q)”).

Again, unfortunately, this doesn’t work because the xquery-flavor of regex doesn’t support looking around.

Sure, I can use “/Q” as pattern and subsequently  stick a “Q” in front of every substring (except the first one) but I’m looking for  a solid solution.

I there anyone out there with enough “regex-for-xquery”- experience to help me with this?

Big thanx for that in advance.

@Christian: On the other hand I can imagine that within Basex the path-expression is built from these elementary steps.

If so, is it in any way possibly to retrieve this elementary steps sequence instead of this path-expression?

Thanx,

Rob Stapper