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[xsl] Usage of Asterisk in XPath expressions

2019-03-22 06:00:51
Hello there,

due to a typo, we missed the colon between the namespace prefix and the wildcard in a XPath expression. To my surpise, this causes static errors in some version of Saxon and runs flawlessly in others, although I would expect this to be static error.

Suppose this data:

<foo:bar xmlns:foo="http://test/ns/foo"; a="b">Yadda</foo:bar>

Then suppose this stylesheet:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
    xmlns:foo="http://test/ns/foo";
    version="2.0">

    <xsl:template match="foo:bar">
        <xsl:if test="ancestor-or-self::foo*[@a]">
            <xsl:copy>
                <xsl:value-of select="."/>
            </xsl:copy>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

As you can see the colon is missing after the namespace prefix foo. What baffles me is that different versions of Saxon exhibit different behavious here, and especially newer versions don't seem to treat this as a problem at all.

 * Saxon 9.6: Stops with something that looks like an internal error
 * Saxon 9.7: Says I need to enable XPath 3.1 to use this expression?!?
 * Saxon 9.8, 9.9: Don't run into an error at all

That makes me wonder: Is this an error at all? or is there some wildcard feature or something in XPath 3.1 that I cam't find in the docs?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Kind regards,

Philipp
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