Re: [xml-dev] Be careful writing XPath expressions when the XML couldhav

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:

But in the general case, I want select //div[@class='section'] to
return every div that has a 'class' attribute whose value is
'section', and none whose @class is something else, or not there at
all. So "@class='section'" returns false() when @class returns an
empty sequence (or node set in XPath 1.0.)

What do you want it to return: a run-time error?

Clearly not.  But what I could see would be an XSLT feature to make it an error

to match against a path that matches nothing.  There would need to be a way

to turn this on and off selectively, of course.

Separation of concerns suggests a Schematron schema would do better, though.

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