Additional Saxon methods

Saxon's implementation of XPathExpression (namely net.sf.saxon.xpath.XPathExpressionImpl) provides additional methods for evaluating the XPath expression. In particular the rawIterator() method with no arguments returns a Saxon SequenceIterator which allows the application to process the results of any XPath expression, with no conversion: all values will be represented using a native Saxon class, for example a node will be represented as a NodeInfo and a QName as a QNameValue. The NodeInfo interface is described in the next section, The NodeInfo interface.

You can call methods directly on the NodeInfo object to get information about a node: for example getDisplayName() gets the name of the node in a form suitable for display, and getStringValue() gets the string value of the node, as defined in the XPath data model. You can also use the node as the context node for evaluation of subsequent expressions.