Usage of & in xquery concat

Question

How can I use & (the ampersand character) in an XQuery concat statement? I'm using eXist DB and this works:

concat("Marvin ", "and", " Peter")

but this doesn't:

concat("Marvin ", "&", " Peter")

I'm getting the error: expecting '"', found '&'

Escaping the ampersand with a \ doesn't work.

Moisten

Funnily enough the notification mail from SO gives the solution away. Your question is shown as: How can I use & (the ampersand character) in an Xquery concat statement? I'm using eXist DB and this works: concat("Marvin ", "and", " Peter") but this doesn't: concat("Marvin ", "&", " ... – Stope

Answer 1

Since & is the escape character for XML character and entity references, it cannot be used as a literal character in either XML or XQuery strings. You have to use an entity to encode it. You can either use the predefined &, or reference it via its Unicode codepoint with &#[...]; (decimal) or &#x[...]; (hexadecimal):

concat("Marvin ", "&", " Peter"),
concat("Marvin ", "&", " Peter"),
concat("Marvin ", "&", " Peter")

Footcandle

For improved readability you can define the variable let $amp := fn:codepoints-to-string(38) . – Homograph