XQuery question

Hi,

I am struggling with an xquery problem and I would be very grateful for 
any advice.

I would like to collect all the nodes in result set, put them into a 
single string and eliminate the duplicate 'words'.
I was hoping to uses something like

fn:distinct-values($list-derived-from-nodeset)

but I can't see how to flatten the nodeset into a string (or 
alternatively a list).

The target fragment of xml is of this form:
<links>
<link id="x" n="y" targets="a b c d"/>
<link id="p" n="q" targets="m e n q a"/>
<link id="i" n="j" targets="u e a s d "/>
...
</links>

which in effect represents a many-to-one relationship @targets => @id
each @targets will contain "a", but there are significant numbers of 
other duplicates, and I want a superset of the contents of the 
@targets.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I am currently using the following query

let $query := concat('//links/link/@targets[. |= "' , $id , '"]'),
$targets := util:eval($query)

and using a for loop to iterate through $targets and perform pattern 
matches on the strings.
This can take quite a while, and wastes a lot of effort because I end 
up processing the same values repeatedly.

Thank you for any help you can offer.

Jonathan Miller

Learning Technologies Group
Oxford University Computing Services



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