on using XQuery for the first time

Obviously, I've been playing around with XSLT [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/?tag=xslt] lately. So naturally, the next logical step was to delve into XQuery, the XML query language de jure. Eventually I want to run queries on MusicXML [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicXML] documents, but I need to start small. While the W3Schools tutorial on XQuery [http://www.w3schools.com/xquery/xquery_intro.asp] is a great introduction, there's one little problem. It doesn't really tell you how to implement XQuery: i.e. how to actually run a query and retrieve results. So after some random perusing and downloading, I - like the fool I am - was made aware by Dr. Michael Kay's "Learn XQuery in 10 Minutes: An XQuery Tutorial" that the Saxon XSLT processor I was already using for XSLT transformations already had an XQuery engine built in. That's to say that the .NET version of Saxon [https://sourceforge.net/projects/saxon/files/Saxon-B/9.1.0.7/saxonb9-1-0-7n.zip/download] has 2 command line executables: 1. Transform.exe, which I'd already used for XSLT transformations 2. Query.exe, which allows one to run XQuery queries So much for paying attention to what I download ... From there, it was a simple matter to use XQuery for the first time. Here are the steps: 1. I downloaded the books.xml [http://www.w3schools.com/xquery/books.xml] file provided by W3Schools and place it into the "bin" directory of Saxon on my drive. This is same directory where the 2 afformentioned executables reside. 2. Using the kick-tail text editor jEdit [http://jedit.org/], I copy/pasted/saved this query example from the W3Schools [http://www.w3schools.com/xquery/xquery_flwor_html.asp] as "test.xquery" (also saved in the "bin" directory): <ul> { for $x in doc("books.xml")/bookstore/book/title order by $x return <li>{data($x)}</li> } </ul> This query simply lists all the titles from "books.xml" in alphabetical order. 3. Then using jEdit's command line plug-in called "Console", I set Console to the Saxon "bin" directory where "query.exe", "books.xml", and "test.xquery" reside. The easiest way to set the directory in Console is to type: cd "C:\Documents and Settings\nitin\Desktop\saxon\bin" Of course, you might extract Saxon elsewhere, but the important thing is to type cd + opening quotation mark + full path to Saxon's "bin" folder + ending quotation mark. 4. Now I was in the correct folder and could run the XQuery with the following command line syntax: query test.xquery And my results look like this: IMAGE: [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/xquery_jedit.jpg] I know what you're thinking: no line breaks! Sure, the computer doesn't care, but this is really hard for humans to read! Yes, that's true. But I went ahead and pasted the following: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><ul><li>Everyday Italian</li><li>Harry Potter</li><li>Learning XML</li><li>XQuery Kick Start</li></ul> into a new document in jEdit anyway. We're gonna take care of those line breaks now ... 5. One of the many great things about jEdit is the ability to run Beanshell [http://www.beanshell.org/] commands, which despite my attempts to sound authoritative, I only learned about roughly 30 minutes ago. This means that a search and replace can be done in jEdit using simple Java syntax to fix that line break issue. The first step is identifying where to insert the line break. I needed it in between > and <. Specifically, I needed a line break between all the red and green colored brackets: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><ul><li>Everyday Italian</li><li>Harry Potter</li><li>Learning XML</li><li>XQuery Kick Start</li></ul> So I just invoked the jEdit search/replace box and did the following: [xquery_jedit_replace.jpg]-Submit This simply says: Find all instances of >< and Replace it with > < - i.e. the text between the quotation marks. The n is, by the way, the line break syntax. When I hit "Replace All", this was the result: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ul> <li>Everyday Italian</li> <li>Harry Potter</li> <li>Learning XML</li> <li>XQuery Kick Start</li> </ul> Problem solved. 6. Now I simply saved this document as "test.html" and opened it in a browser. Anyway, that's my very simple start to XQuery, but I'm feeling pretty good about it nonetheless.