iterate xpath command-or-block

Iterate works very much like a foreach loop with the same xpath expression, except that it evaluates the command-or-block as soon as a new node matching a given xpath is found. As a limitation, an xpath expression used with iterate may consist of one XPath step only, i.e. it may not contain an XPath step separator /.

A possible benefit of using iterate instead of foreach is some efficiency when iterating over huge node-sets. Since iterate doesn't compute the resulting node-set in advance, it doesn't have to 1) allocate extra memory for it and 2) (more importantly) doesn't have to sort the node-list in the document order (which tends to be slow on large node-sets, unless index is used). On the other hand, iterate suffers from a considerable speed penalty since it isn't implemented in C (unlike libxml2's XPath engine).

Author's experience shows that, unless index is used, iterate beats foreach in speed on large node-lists (>=1500 nodes, but your milage may vary) while foreach wins on smaller node-lists.

The following two examples give equivalent results. However, the one using iterate may be faster if the number of nodes being counted is huge and document order isn't indexed.

cd rohan/inhabitants;

iterate child::*[@age>=18 and @age<60] { perl $productive++ };

echo "$productive inhabitants in productive age";

$productive=count(rohan/inhabitants/*[@age>=18 and @age<60]);

echo "$productive inhabitants in productive age";

Hint: use e.g. | time cut pipe-line redirection to benchmark a XSH2 command on a UNIX system.

foreach, index, next, prev, last