Escaping curly brackets in source XML in XQuery

Question

Using XQuery (BaseX implementation), I need to process a set of XML records that may contain pairs of curly brackets within element text (eg, <a>Abc {de} fg</a> ). Right now, I am preprocessing the records outside of XQuery to ensure that these characters have been escaped as double brackets ( <a>Abc {{de}} fg</a> ).

Is there a standard way to escape these characters within XQuery in order to prevent them from being executed as an expression?

Answer 1

If you want to embed arbitrary UTF-8 encoded XML input in your query, you can use the XQuery 3.1 string constructor and fn:parse-xml :

let $string := ``[<a>Abc {de} fg</a>]``
return fn:parse-xml($string)

The only thing you should ensure is that your XML string does not contain the characters ]`` .

In general, the safest way is to save your input in external files (or in a database) and address it via fn:doc , fn:collection , fetch:xml , db:open , etc.