SAXONB-XQUERY(1)

✨ saxonb-xquery(1) ✨ — the command line XQuery processor

okay bestie, welcome to section 1 of the manual, this is the saxonb-xquery era and we're gonna get you fluent in it 💖

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💫 NAME 💫

saxonb-xquery — command line XQuery processor. that's it, that's the vibe 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

saxonb-xquery [OPTION...] QUERYFILE [NAME=VALUE...]

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So this page is the lil manual for the saxonb-xquery command, and ngl it exists purely because the Debian™ distribution needed it — the original program never shipped a manpage of its own 😭. It does have HTML documentation though, and that lives in the libsaxonb-java-doc package, iykyk.

saxonb-xquery is a command line wrapper around the Saxon-B XSLT and XQuery processor. The whole point? You can evaluate XQuery queries straight from the command line, no cap. Under the hood it's a wrapper around the Java class net.sf.saxon.Query, which is implemented by Saxon-B 🔥

The way you call it: you pass a required filename containing the XQuery query you want evaluated. And listen — the special filename "-" can be given if you want it to read the query from standard input instead 👑

Before the query filename, you can hand it a list of options — see below, we get into all of them.

🧚 Parameters

At the end of the command line, a list of parameters can be given. Parameters use the syntax NAME=VALUE, so you're specifying parameter names and their values, periodt.

• A parameter name prefixed with "+" (plus sign) gets interpreted as a filesystem path parameter. If the path points to a single file, that file is parsed as XML and its document node gets passed as the parameter value. If the path points to a directory, all directly contained files get parsed as XML files, and the sequence of their document nodes gets passed as the parameter value 🌈
• A parameter name prefixed with "!" (exclamation mark) gets interpreted as an output/serialization parameter. Peep the specifications of XQuery and XSLT 2.0 if you want more on output/serialization parameters.
• To pass parameters that belong to a non-null namespace, the syntax {uri}localname=value is provided 💅

Parameters will be visible as external variables during query evaluation — but only provided they've been declared in the query prolog, so don't come crying if you skipped that part. See the XQuery specification for more on variables and their declarations.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

A summary of supported options is included below. Options can be passed in any order, no stress 🫶

We first report the options shared by saxonb-xquery and saxonb-xslt, then the ones specific to saxonb-xquery (or the ones that have different semantics).

Some options are flagged as "Saxon-SA only" — those only work if Saxon-SA is installed. Heads up: Saxon-SA is a commercial product, so it is not available in Debian. 💀

🌟 Common options

• -cr:classname — specify a class to be used for processing collection URIs passed to the collection() function. The class must implement net.sf.saxon.CollectionURIResolver.
• -dtd: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable DTD validation. Default: off.
• -expand: {[on] | [off]} — when validation is enabled, expand default values in validated documents. This option enables or disables such an expansion. Default: on.
• -explain [:filename] — display an execution plan; the output is in XML format. If filename is not given it will be displayed on standard output.
• -ext: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable the ability to invoke external Java functions from query files and stylesheets. Beware: enabling them is a potential security risk when processing untrusted files. Default: off.
• -l: {[on] | [off]} — keep (when on) or throw away (when off) line numbers in trees corresponding to source documents. When kept, line numbers can be accessed using the function saxon:line-number(). Default: off.
• -outval: {[recover] | [fatal]} — when validation is required, set whether validation errors are fatal (when "fatal" is passed) or if they only trigger warnings (when "recover" is). Default: fatal.
• -p: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable usage of the PTreeURIResolver. Saxon-SA only.
• -r:classname — specify a class to be used for resolving all URIs.
• -repeat:N — repeat the transformation N times. For benchmarking purposes.
• -sa — perform schema-aware processing. Saxon-SA only.
• -strip: {[all] | [none] | [ignorable]} — specify the whitespace stripping policy for source documents: strip all of them ("all"), strip none of them ("none"), strip ignorable whitespace only ("ignorable"). Default: none.
• -t — display version, timing, and other debugging information on standard error.
• -tree: {[tiny] | [linked]} — select the implementation of the internal tree model: tiny tree model ("tiny") or linked tree model ("linked"). See the Saxon documentation for more on the internal tree model. Default: tiny.
• -T [:classname] — trace various aspects of the processing; an optional class name can be given to specify a user-chosen tracer. The class must implement net.sf.saxon.trace.TraceListener. The default is a system supplied tracer. This option implies -l.
• -TJ — enable tracing of external Java method invocation. See -ext.
• -u — force interpretation of source document names as URI. By default they are considered to be file names, unless they start with "file:" or "http:".
• -val: {[strict] | [lax]} — when validation is enabled, choose among "strict" or "lax" validation. Saxon-SA only.
• -x:classname — specify a class to be used as SAX parser for input documents. The class must implement either org.xml.sax.Parser or org.xml.sax.XMLReader.
• -xi — apply XInclude processing to all input documents.
• -xmlversion: {[1.0] | [1.1]} — choose the XML version for processing input documents. "1.1" must be specified to process XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 constructs. Default: 1.0.
• -? — display a help message and exit.

🦋 Options specific to saxonb-xquery

• -mr:classname — use the specified class as a ModuleURIResolver to resolve query module URIs. The class must implement net.sf.saxon.query.ModuleURIResolver.
• -o:filename — send the query output to the specified filename. If not specified, the output will be sent to standard output. See also -wrap.
• -pipe: {[push] | [pull]} — internally, execute query in push or pull mode. Mainly for testing purposes. Push mode is usually faster when intermediate trees are constructed in memory. Default: push.
• -projection: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable document projection, i.e. the ability to throw away tree parts which will not be accessed by a query. Saxon-SA only.
• -s: {[file] | [URI]} — read document input from the specified filename ("-" can be given to read from standard input). The read document will be available to the query as the context node. -u affects how filename is interpreted.
• -wrap: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable wrapping of query result in an XML structure which makes explicit the kind of each output node or atomic value. For example, free-standing attributes will be wrapped in an explicit XML element stating that they are attributes. When this is off, the query output will be wrapped only using a document node; in such a setting it is possible that output parts, such as free-standing attributes, can't be serialized. Default: off.

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• saxonb-xslt (1)
• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language (W3C Recommendation)

This program is fully documented by the HTML documentation of Saxon, available in the libsaxon-java-doc Debian package 📚

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

This manual page was written by Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> for the Debian™ system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright © 2008 Stefano Zacchiroli

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and that's the whole page bestie, we ate that 💅✨ it's from February 2008, and yeah, it's SAXONB-XQUERY(1) all the way down 🎀 go run some queries, you got this 🫶