There have been attempts into that direction, but it was eventually abandoned due to its complexity: https://github.com/qt4cg/qtspecs/issues/1069 ________________________________________ Von: Graydon Saunders <graydonish@fastmail.com> Gesendet: Montag, 25. Mai 2026 18:11 An: Christian Grün; BaseX; Martin Honnen Betreff: Re: [basex-talk] Re: Access to the Unicode Character Database from XQuery? Thank you! Would be nice to have `unicode-char()` (and `unicode-character-property()`) but I can't imagine those are priorities for anyone. On Mon, May 25, 2026, at 11:54, Christian Grün wrote: Hi Graydon, The spec expects the argument to be resolved against the characters defined in the HTML Living Standard [1,2]. The entity for the double-dagger character seems to be “ddagger”. Cheers, Christian [1] https://qt4cg.org/specifications/xpath-functions-40/Overview.html#func-char [2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#named-character-references ________________________________________ Von: Graydon Saunders <graydonish@fastmail.com<mailto:graydonish@fastmail.com>> Gesendet: Montag, 25. Mai 2026 17:46 An: Christian Grün; BaseX; Martin Honnen Betreff: Re: [basex-talk] Re: Access to the Unicode Character Database from XQuery? Hi Christian, Curiously, char('dagger') gives me † and char('Dagger') gives me ‡. char('DAGGER') returns an error: "[FOCH0005] Invalid name, glyph or codepoint value: DAGGER (similar: Dagger)." None of the case permutations of character:getName(0x2021) which is "DOUBLE DAGGER" are acceptable to `char()`. The numeric, 0x2021, works. (The optimizer happily reduces all of these that work to string literals.) I'm using BaseX 12.3, if that should be relevant. Thanks! Graydon On Mon, May 25, 2026, at 11:26, Christian Grün via BaseX-Talk wrote: You can also do: char('dagger'), char(0x2020) ________________________________________ Von: Martin Honnen via BaseX-Talk <basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de><mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de>>> Gesendet: Montag, 25. Mai 2026 17:16 An: basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de><mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de>> Betreff: [basex-talk] Re: Access to the Unicode Character Database from XQuery? On 25/05/2026 17:03, Graydon Saunders via BaseX-Talk wrote:
I am currently exploring what to do when a footnote callout, which will wind up in an xs:ID value, is something like U+2020 DAGGER; one obvious way is to use the character name. (So instead of an @id value of `Fn1` I'd have `Fndagger` or similar.)
I see that the current draft of XPath 4.0 has new-since-3.0 `characters()` and `grapheme()` functions, but so far as I may tell it does not have a way to get UCD properties for a codepoint.
Is there an XQuery (or BaseX) way to do this?
You can call Java declare namespace character = "java:java.lang.Character"; character:getName(0x2020)