Saxon

We dropped these functions because for many years the standard xsl:evaluate instruction has been available, which does the same job in a much better way.

Thanks Michael, and what is an alternative for calling these functions in XQuery?

Using fn:tansform calling a public XSLT function doing the xsl:evaluate is an option:

declare namespace output = "http://www.w3.org/2010/xslt-xquery-serialization";

declare option output:method 'xml';
declare option output:indent 'yes';

declare function local:eval($expression as xs:string, $context-item as item()?) as item()* {
  transform(
    map {
      'stylesheet-node' : <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="3.0" 
        xmlns:mf="http://example.com/mf"
        xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
        exclude-result-prefixes="#all">
        <xsl:function name="mf:eval" as="item()*" visibility="public">
          <xsl:param name="expression" as="xs:string"/>
          <xsl:param name="context-item" as="item()?"/>
          <xsl:evaluate xpath="$expression" context-item="$context-item"/>
        </xsl:function>
      </xsl:stylesheet>,
      'initial-function' : QName('http://example.com/mf', 'eval'),
      'function-params': [$expression, $context-item],
      'delivery-format': 'raw'
    }
  )?output
};

local:eval('sort(//item)', document { <root><item>b</item><item>c</item><item>a</item></root> })

Thanks Martin, the proposed xquery function seems to work just fine :)

For Michael, one remark about the use of saxon:evaluate inside XQuery with Saxon 12, it seems that the error that the function no longer exists is reported at runtime, not at compile time. For XSLT for example the error is reported directly at compile time and Oxygen presents the error when validating the XSLT instead of needing to transform the content it.

Thanks Michael, so in Saxon 12.4 the functions will start working again both in XSLT and XQuery files.

Yes, that's right.