Re: collection() and uncommon file extensions

Everything about the collection() function is very implementation-specific, so
this is really a Saxon question rather than an XSLT question. (And no, there
are no plans to define standards in this area, though it would be nice.)

The way you are going about it looks right to me. It's probably failing
because of some detail that you didn't realise was important. I know it's
difficult to put together a repro for this kind of problem but that's really
what we need.

Around 40 years ago I worked with an operating system that knew the content
type of each file. Shame the idea didn't catch on.

Michael Kay
Saxonica



> On 15 Nov 2018, at 19:32, Martin Holmes gtxxgm-xsl-list-2@xxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> The recent changes to XPath
(https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions-31/#func-collection) have introduced
the capability for the collection() function to retrieve non-XML documents as
well as XML documents. However, that has broken some processes I have where
XML documents with different extensions are being retrieved. For instance,
where this:
>
> collection('dir/?*.hocr')
>
> used to happily retrieve and parse HOCR files (which are actually XHTML),
Saxon now treats these files as xs:base64Binary items, and won't parse them,
even though they have XML declarations.
>
> I know that the recommended approach to dealing with this is to use a Saxon
configuration file to register the file extension -- which I presume would be
done like this:
>
> <resources>
>  <fileExtension extension="hocr" mediaType="text/xml"/>
> </resources>
>
> However, this doesn't seem to work for me -- do I have that syntax wrong?
>
> Also, the conf file approach isn't easily portable, so I'm wondering if
there are any plans to enable the media type to be specified on the
collection() function itself, or to be registered in an XSLT document
somehow?
>
> Cheers,
> Martin