Re: xpath improvement suggestion

On ons, 2010-01-06 at 23:46 +0100, Arie Bikker wrote:
> Hope this is the right attachement type (I'm new at this)
> BTW. here a some nice examples:
>
> - Get the number of attributes of the first childnode:
>
> select ( xpath('count(@*)',(xpath('*[1]','<a b="c"><d e="f"
> g="j"/></a>'))[1]))[1];
>
> - an alternative for xpath_exist('/a/d')
> select (xpath('boolean(/a/d)','<a b="c"><d e="f" g="j"/></a>'))[1];
>
> - fixes bug 4206
>
> select xpath('//text()',xmlparse(document '<?xml
> version="1.0"?><elem1><elem2>one</elem2><elem2>two</elem2><elem2>three</elem2><elem3att="2"/></elem1>'));
>
> - fixes bug 4294
>
> select xpath('name(/my:a/*[last()])', '<a
> xmlns="http://myns.com/ns"><b>text1</b><c>text2</c></a>',
> ARRAY[ARRAY['my','http://myns.com/ns']]);

Instead of converting everything to text, there have been previous
suggestions to add functionx like xpath_string, xpath_number,
xpath_boolean that return the appropriate types from xpath. This could
provide for better type safety and probably also more clarity.

In any case, please consider adding test cases like the above to the
regression tests in whatever patch comes out at the end.