XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition (20 page)

The name of an element or attribute node is accessible, as an
xs:QName
value, using the
node-name()
function defined in Chapter 13. The namespace URI and local-name parts of the name are also separately accessible (as strings) using the functions
namespace-uri()
and
local-name()
. If you want the original lexical QName, it can be obtained using the
name()
function.

Document nodes, comments, and text nodes have no name, and for these, the
node-name()
function returns the empty sequence, which is the XDM equivalent of a null value. (Note that this differs from the DOM, where names such as
#comment
are used.)

The name of a processing instruction is the
PITarget
from the source XML: this contains a local name but no namespace URI, as processing instruction names are not subject to namespace rules.

The name of a namespace node is, by convention, the namespace prefix from the original namespace declaration (without the
xmlns:
part). For example, the namespace declaration
xmlns:acme=“http://acme.com/xml”
generates a namespace node with name
acme
, while the default namespace declaration
xmlns=“http://acme.com/xml”
generates a namespace node whose name is effectively null (represented as an empty sequence). The name of a namespace node, like the name of any other node, is an
xs:QName
, but the namespace URI part of this
xs:QName
is always null, while the local-name part holds the namespace prefix.

The String Value of a Node

Every node has a string value, which is a sequence of Unicode characters. The string value depends on the kind of node, as shown in the table below:

Node Kind	String Value
Text	The text as it appears in the source XML document, except that the XML parser will have replaced every end-of-line sequence (for example, CRLF as used on Windows platforms) by a single newline ( x0A ) character.
Comment	The text of the comment, minus the delimiters.
Processing instruction	The data part of the source processing instruction, not including the whitespace that separates it from the PITarget . For example, given the processing instruction this?> , the string value is this .
Attribute	The string value is the value of the attribute as written, modified by any whitespace normalization done by the XML parser and schema processor. The detailed rules for whitespace normalization of attributes depend on the attribute type.
Document or element	The concatenation of the string values of all the element and text children of this node. Or, to look at it another way: the concatenation of all the PCDATA contained in the element (or for the document node, the entire document) after stripping out all markup. (This again differs from the DOM, where the nodeValue property in these cases is null.)
Namespace	By convention, the URI of the namespace being declared.