I imagine they will tell you the normal way to do this is to acquire or
construct a (temporary) tree, and then query that.

It's much more powerful than a hashmap because it can be arbitrarily
complex.

Whether it performs as well in XQuery, where xsl:key is not available to
indicate that an index is called for, will be an interesting question.
(But not on topic for this list. Unless it's threaded as a comparison
between the sisters.) In theory I suppose it should, inasmuch as this
sort of thing is what XQuery is for, but there are likely to be devils
in the details.

Cheers,
Wendell

Hi Wolfgang,

Actually I shouldn't have posted the question on this list.  I know
about the xsl:key instruction but was hoping for a xpath / xquery
solution where I can store the key/value pairs in a dictionary
variable ;-)

Will post my question to the Xquery list instead.

--
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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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