Whitespace problem in CSV-like output

[Yves Forkl]

I am very grateful to both of you for your valuable suggestions.

It is a bit disappointing to see that XQuery does not offer a simple, 
general method to create CSV-type files, at least not in my case.

I have picked up the idea to use functions, but rather than 
encapsulating the query, I (for now) prefer to put the string 
manipulation operations into functions so that I can reuse them and use 
them for parametrization.

So now I have:

xquery version "1.0" encoding "ISO-8859-1";
declare namespace saxon="http://saxon.sf.net/";
declare namespace my="http://xmlns.srz.de/yforkl/xquery/functions";

declare option saxon:output "method=text";

declare function my:join-fields-into-record
   ( $fields as xs:string*,
     $delimiter as xs:string ) as xs:string {
       concat(string-join($fields, $delimiter), "
")
  } ;
declare function my:join-records-into-lines
   ( $records as xs:string* ) as xs:string {
       string-join($records, "")
  } ;

my:join-records-into-lines(
   let $entries := /list/entry

   for $property1 in distinct-values($entries/property1),
       $property2 in distinct-values(
         $entries[property1 = $property1]/property2)
     let $selected_entries := $entries[property1 = $property1 and
                                       property2 = $property2]
     order by $property1, $property2
     return(
       my:join-fields-into-record(
         ($property1,
          $property2,
          translate(
            xs:string(
              sum(
                for $quantity in $selected_entries/quantity
                     return xs:decimal(translate($quantity,
                                                 ",",
                                                 ".")))),
                    ".",
                    ",")),
         ";"))
)

NB: While the names of the functions seem to suggest that the line feed 
should rather be appended in my:join-records-into-lines than in 
my:join-fields-into-record, I don't see any easy way to do this.

   Yves