- Created: Nov 28, 2017
- Updated: Nov 29, 2017: Now covers transformation of XML documents
Recursion is a powerful programming technique, but the idea is simple: instead of performing a single operation, a function calls itself repeatedly to whittle through a larger task. In XQuery, recursion can be used to accomplish complex tasks on data that a plain FLWOR expression (which iterates through a sequence) cannot, such as transforming an entire XML document from one format into another, like TEI or DocBook into HTML, EPUB, LaTeX, or XSL-FO. Transforming a document is well-suited to recursion because each of the document's nodes may need to be examined and manipulated based on the node's type, name, and location in the document; and once a node has been processed, the transformation must continue processing the nodes' children and descendants until the deepest leaf node has been processed. But learning the technique of recursion is often hard for a beginning program
