XPath2 :How to access all documents in a folder?

Question

XSLT2/Xpath2 allow you to open a document using the document() or doc() functions, but you have to specify the filename.

Is there a way to open all the documents in a given file folder without knowing their filenames (and without a lookup table or master document)? Perhaps using wildcards?

For example, it would be nice to do something like

...

to process all the documents in the current directory without necessarily knowing what they are. Is there some way to do this?

Martin Honnen · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-17T17:19:50.520

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Well document and doc allow you to process XML documents. And XSLT 2.0 processors like Saxon 9 allow you to use the collection function to pull in all XML documents in a certain directory, see http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/sourcedocs/collections.xml.

AltovaXML also allows you to pull in certain documents in a folder or directory with the collection function: http://manual.altova.com/AltovaXML/altovaxmlcommunity/index.html?fnfunctionssupport.htm

edited Nov 17 '11 at 17:19

answered Nov 17 '11 at 16:54

Martin Honnen

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Excellent. Thanks for the reference. I looked at the W3 documents and could not find anything. – David R Nov 17 '11 at 18:58

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

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Using saxon is your best hope in my opinion. As Martin Honnen already pointed out, Saxon allows the use of collections to scan directories using regular expressions which is very handy. Please refer to the link below for more detailed instructions as to how that's done.

XSLT: How to get file names from a certain directory?

More comprehensive guide on using collection() function:

http://www.xmlplease.com/collection

edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

Community

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answered Nov 17 '11 at 17:01

dnshio

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Thanks for the additional link. – David R Nov 17 '11 at 18:57

XPath2 :How to access all documents in a folder?

2 Answers2