Looks like a too eager optimization. Did you have a chance to look at the resulting query plan?

Giuseppe Celano <celano@informatik.uni-leipzig.de> schrieb am Fr., 6. Juli 2018, 22:40:

I have noticed that in BaseX 9.0.2 a query like

<j>fgrtu</j>/data(.)/replace(., "g", "h")

gets evaluated (returning "fhrtu"), while in BaseX 8.x, Exist, and Zorba I get an error message (since, as expected, replace() is preceded not by a node but a string).

Is this a bug?

Ciao,
Giuseppe