XQuery

Arithmetic Operations

The following typical arithmetic operations can be performed on numeric values:

• Addition and subtraction using the plus (+) and the minus (−) sign

• Negation of a single value using the minus sign (−)

• Multiplication using the * operator

• Division using the div operator

• Integer division (with results truncated) using the idiv operator

• Modulus (the remainder of a division) using the mod operator

Some of these arithmetic operators can be used on date and time types in addition to numeric types. Date/time arithmetic is described in Chapter 19.

If the value NaN is involved in an arithmetic operation (and the other operand is not the empty sequence), the result is always NaN. If the empty sequence is used in an arithmetic operation, the result is always the empty sequence. It is important to understand that the empty sequence is different from zero. For example, $product/price - $product/discount is equal to the empty sequence (not the value of $product/price) if there is no element that matches the $product/discount path.

Arithmetic Operations on Multiple Values

Arithmetic operators cannot accept a sequence of more than one value as one of their operands. For example:

doc("prices.xml")//price * 2

will raise a type error because more than one price element is returned by the path expression. To perform an arithmetic operation on a sequence of values, you can put parentheses around the arithmetic operation, as in:

doc("prices.xml")//(price * 2)

which will ...