[Bug 7450] New: [XPath] 'for' expression example does not produce expected output

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7450

           Summary: [XPath] 'for' expression example does not produce
                    expected output
           Product: XPath / XQuery / XSLT
           Version: Recommendation
          Platform: All
               URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xpath20-20070123/#id-for-
                    expressions
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: trivial
          Priority: P5
         Component: XPath
        AssignedTo: jonathan.robie@redhat.com
        ReportedBy: zongaro@ca.ibm.com
         QAContact: public-qt-comments@w3.org


Some colleagues pointed out a problem in example 'for' expression that appears
in the second box in section 3.7 of XPath 2.0.[1]

    for $a in fn:distinct-values(book/author)
    return (book/author[. = $a][1], book[author = $a]/title)

The paragraph that appears before the example indicates that it "transforms the
input document into a list in which each author's name appears only once,
followed by a list of titles of books written by that author."

However, the expression before the comma operator actually selects, for each
book element that has one or more author elements that match $a, the first such
author element for that book.  So one author element will appear for each book
written by that author.  With the given input, the output will be:

<author>Stevens</author>
<author>Stevens</author>
<title>TCP/IP Illustrated</title>
<title>Advanced Programming in the Unix environment</title>
<author>Abiteboul</author>
<title>Data on the Web</title>
<author>Buneman</author>
<title>Data on the Web</title>
<author>Suciu</author>
<title>Data on the Web</title>

The following was probably intended:

    for $a in fn:distinct-values(book/author)
    return ((book/author[. = $a])[1], book[author = $a]/title)

The corresponding example in XQuery 1.0 was written differently, and does not
have the same problem.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xpath20-20070123/#id-for-expressions


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Received on Friday, 28 August 2009 01:07:30 UTC