Whitespace (spaces, tabs, and line breaks) is allowed almost anywhere in a query to break up expressions and make queries more readable. You are required to use whitespace to separate keywords from each other—for example, order by
cannot be written as orderby
. Extra whitespace is acceptable, as in order by
. By contrast, you are not required to use whitespace as a separator when using nonword symbols such as = and (. For example, you can use a=b
or a = b
.
In most cases, whitespace used in queries has no significance. Whitespace is significant in quoted strings, e.g., in the expression "contains spaces"
, and in constructed elements and attributes.
No special end-of-line characters are required in the XQuery language as they might be in some programming languages. Newline and carriage return characters are treated like any other whitespace.
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