"Canonical Path" Function in XQuery?

Question

Is there an standard XQuery function that will return a 'canonical' path for a node?
I mean something like:

/root/element/sub-element[0]

Answer 1

Since XQuery 3.0 there is fn:path($node), which does exactly that. If it is not supported by your query processor, you can also use FunctX's functx:path-to-node-with-pos($node), which unfortunately does not play well with namespaces.

Answer 2

Yes, in the predicate of a path expression using XQuery you can do something like:

doc("books.xml")/bookstore/book[substring(title,1,5)='Harry']

Hope that helps!