SAXONICA

Saxon Documentation
Full Contents
About Saxon
Changes in this Release
| Version 8.9 (2007-02-12)
» | Version 8.8 (2006-09-05)
| Version 8.7.3 (2006-06-13)
| Version 8.7.2 (2006-04-19)
| Version 8.7.1 (2006-04-13)
| Version 8.7 (2006-02-24)
| Version 8.6.1 (24 November 2005)
| Version 8.6 (3 November 2005)
| Version 8.5.1 (26 August 2005)
| Version 8.5 (2 August 2005)
| Version 8.4 (4 April 2005)
| Version 8.3 (11 February 2005)
| Version 8.2 (21 December 2004)
| Version 8.1.1 (8 October 2004)
| Version 8.1 (24 September 2004)
| Version 8.0 (1 June 2004)
Conditions of Use
Using XSLT 2.0
Using XQuery
Handling Source Documents
XML Schema Processing
XPath API for Java
Saxon on .NET
Extensibility
Saxon Extensions
Sample Saxon Applications
The Saxon SQL Extension
XSLT Elements
XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax
Function Library
Standards Conformance

# Functions and Operators

The new XSLT function `type-available` has been implemented. See W3C Bugzilla entry 3165 for details.

The component extraction functions on `xs:duration` have been changed to return normalized values. For example `seconds-from-duration(xs:duration('PT90S'))` now returns 30 rather than 90. See W3C Bugzilla entry 3369 for details of the specification change.

On JDK 1.5, and on the .NET platform, a case-blind regular expression (that is, the "i" flag) is now expanded by Saxon into the equivalent case-sensitive regular expression, rather than relying on the implementation of case-blind searching in the underlying regex engine. This change has been made because it was found that on both the Java and .NET platforms, case-blind searching did not behave according to the detailed rules defined for XPath, and in fact it was impossible to determine what the detailed rules were. On JDK 1.4, however, the underlying implementation is still used, which gives slighly different behaviour in corner cases involving character negation and subtraction.

The `document-uri()` function now returns a document URI in a wider range of circumstances, for example, it returns a value for documents returned by the `collection()` function. This has been achieved by ignoring the requirement that `doc(document($D))` should always return $D. For example, if all the documents returned by a user-written CollectionURIResolver have the SystemId "dummy", then this string will be returned as the value of the document-uri property, even though the call `doc('dummy')` will not deliver the same (or any) document.

A consequence of this change is that the data model now distinguishes more carefully between the document URI and the base URI. For a document node, the document URI is represented internally by the `SystemId` property of the `DocumentInfo` object, while the base URI is represented by the `BaseURI` property. The document node of a temporary tree has a base URI, but it has no document URI. This means that the `SystemId` of a temporary document should now be null, whereas it was previously set to the value of the base URI.

If a URI passed to the `document()` function contains a fragment identifier, the fragment identifier must now be a valid NCName, otherwise a fatal error `XTRE1160` is reported. Note that Saxon (as permitted by the letter of the specification) treats any document successfully retrieved by the `document()` function as having media type `application/xml` for the purpose of interpreting any fragment identifier.

The `CollectionURIResolver` interface has changed to allow collections to be stable (in the sense that retrieving the same collection twice will return the same nodes). The items in the `SequenceIterator` returned by this class may now be `xs:anyURI` values, as an alternative to returning nodes directly as NodeInfo instances. If `xs:anyURI` values are returned, the actual document is obtained by supplying this URI to the doc() function. This means Saxon first checks to see if there is already a loaded document with this URI, and if so, that document is returned. If there is no such document, then it will be loaded by calling the registered URIResolver. This mechanism is backwards compatible with existing user-written `CollectionURIResolver` implementations.

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