How to unencode escaped XML with xQuery

Question

I have a variable in xQuery of type xs:string with the value of an encoded HTML snippet (the content of a twitter tweet). It looks like this:

Headline

Answer 1

Depends on which XQuery processor you are using... The easiest way is to be using a processor that has an extension that handles this for you. For instance, with Saxon and the following XML:

<c>asdf</c>

You can write an XQuery that uses the saxon:parse() function to do what you want:

declare namespace saxon = "http://saxon.sf.net/";

{
  saxon:parse(doc('test.xml')/a)
}

The result from that is:

  asdf

I think most(?) XQuery processors will have an extension to do this for you. Hope that helps.