Saxon 9.3 failed for process wild character *

[Jianming Xu]

fail.xq:
for $item in doc("items.xml")//items//item
where $item//description="Red*"
return $item//itemno

Result:
C:\saxonhe>java -cp saxon9he.jar net.sf.saxon.Query -t -s:items.xml -q:fail.xq
Saxon-HE 9.3.0.4J from Saxonica
Java version 1.6.0-rc
Analyzing query from fail.xq
Analysis time: 172 milliseconds
Processing file:/C:/saxonhe/items.xml
Source document ignored - query does not access the context item
URIResolver.resolve href="items.xml" base="file:/C:/saxonhe/fail.xq"
Using parser
com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser

Building tree for file:/C:/saxonhe/items.xml using class
net.sf.saxon.tree.tiny.
TinyBuilder
Tree built in 15 milliseconds
Tree size: 28 nodes, 59 characters, 0 attributes
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>Execution time: 78ms
Memory used: 4403992

[Jianming Xu]

items.xml:
<items>
<item>
<itemno>1001</itemno>
<description>Red Bicycle</description>
<price>400</price>
</item>
<item>
<itemno>1002</itemno>
<description>Red Car</description>
<price>5000</price>
</item>
</items>

[Michael Kay]

Firstly, Saxon does not support the XQuery Full-Text Option.

Secondly, even if it did, your syntax is wrong: wildcards are not recognized
unless you have enabled this option, and the wildcard must be written "."
rather than "".

You can achieve what you are trying to do here using regular expressions

(matches(., "Red.*")

or by using the starts-with function

(starts-with(., "Red"))

. Of course, unlike Full Text, these operate naively on the characters in the
source document, rather than doing any intelligent linguistic stemming.