Name

distinct — Removes double entities from the input sequence

Synopsis

sequence distinct ( input sequence );

Description

The function takes a single parameter which is sequence of XML entities (nodes or values) and returns the sequence that results from removing from input sequence all but one of a set of elements that are identical each other. If input sequence is the empty, the empty sequence is returned.

Note that the distinct is not a part of XPATH 1.0 or XQuery 1.0 standard library, it is rather a generalization of standard distinct-nodes and distinct-values functions.

Parameters

input

The sequence of XML entities

Return Types

Sequence

Examples

Example24.577.Removing double entities

In the following example the file example.xml is

<a>
<b/>
<b/>
</a>

The result of the query

<result>
   {
   distinct(for $r in document("example.xml")//b return $r) 
   }
</result>

is only one 'b' element:

<result>
<b/>
</result>