Great point Yitzhak, thank you. I wasn't thinking about how much I could abuse the glob syntax for the `$pattern`. Best, Bridger On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 11:26 AM Yitzhak Khabinsky via BaseX-Talk <basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de> wrote:

Hello,

You can reduce:

file:list($path, false(), '*.txt')[starts-with(., 'retrospect-')]

to the following:

file:list($path, false(), 'retrospect-*.txt')

It is up to you to test and compare both approaches: #1 vs. #2.

Regards, Yitzhak Khabinsky