fn:doc

Retrieves an XML document located at the specified URI, parses it, and returns its document node.

doc($uri as xs:string?) ➔ document-node()?

Namespace

http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions

Links to W3C specifications

XPath 3.1 Functions and Operators

Saxon availability

Available in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and later versions. Available in all Saxon editions.

Notes on the Saxon implementation

By default the URI is dereferenced using the conventional URL behaviour, as implemented by the Java run-time library; this behaviour can be modified by means of a user-supplied URIResolver.

If the same URI is requested repeatedly, Saxon retains the document node in memory and returns the same instance each time.

The way the URI is handled depends on the URIResolver in use. The standard URI resolver has an option (set using -p on the command line, or via options on the Configuration or TransformerFactory classes) to recognize query parameters in the URI. These are keyword=value pairs, separated by semicolons or ampersand characters, giving options for parsing the file located via the URI. The options that are then recognized are:

• validation=strict|lax|preserve|strip: determines how the input document will be validated. The options strict and lax require Saxon-EE.

• strip-space=yes|no|ignorable: determines whether whitespace-only text nodes will be stripped from the source document. (Such nodes are stripped if this is requested either using this option, or using xsl:strip-space declarations in the stylesheet.) The value ignorable causes whitespace text nodes to be stripped if they belong to an element defined in a DTD or schema as having element-only content.

• parser=full.class.name: determines the name of the parser (XMLReader) to be used to parse this input file. For example, parser=org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser causes John Cowan's TagSoup parser for HTML to be used.

• xinclude=yes|no: determines whether XInclude processing should be applied to the input document. This overrides any setting in the Configuration (or any command line option).