test="string(member_name)"
because that saves it counting the length of a string
(strings used in a
test are true if non-empty, so you don't really need the
length) on the
other hand Mike will probably tell us saxon special cases
tests against
string-length = 0 and produces the same code in both cases.
Indeed, it does.
string-length() is a more expensive function than you might imagine because
of the need to go through the string looking for Unicode surrogate pairs
(assuming strings are stored in UTF-16, as they are in Java).
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/