XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition (531 page)

Usage

Often
compare()
is followed by a three-way branch. Because XPath has no switch or case expression, it is best to assign the result of the function to a variable to avoid doing the comparison twice. For example, in XSLT:

Or, in XQuery 1.0:

In pure XPath 2.0, you can do this rather awkwardly with a
for
expression:

See Also

Collations
on page 459 in Chapter 6

Value Comparisons
on page 581 in Chapter 8

concat

The
concat()
function takes two or more arguments. Each of the arguments is converted to a string, and the resulting strings are joined together end-to-end.

For example, the expression
concat(‘Jane’, ‘ ’, ‘Brown’)
returns the string
Jane Brown
.

Changes in 2.0

None.

Signature

This function is unique in that it can take any number of arguments (two or more).

Effect

Each of the supplied strings is appended to the result string, in the order they appear.

Any argument that is an empty sequence is ignored. If all the arguments are empty sequences, the result is a zero-length string.

Note that all the arguments will automatically be cast to strings.

Examples

Expression	Result
concat(“a”, “b”, “c”)	The string abc
concat(“chap”, 3)	The string chap3
concat(“a”, (), (), “b”)	The string ab
concat(“a”, (“b”, “c”))	In 1.0 mode: the string ab (when a sequence is converted to a string in backward-compatibility mode, all items after the first are discarded). In 2.0 mode: error. The argument must be a single string, not a sequence of strings. Use the string-join() function instead.