Hi Andrew, > 'contains(.,">")', > … > return true, as expected.
The difference is that < and > don’t have to be encoded if they are used in strings. You can write… contains('', '<') …but the following query is invalid: contains('<', '&') > I can get the expected result if I double-escape the entity: > 'contains(.,"&amp;")' You can use the string constructor syntax, it’s often better readable: xquery:eval( ``[contains(., "&")]``, map { '': <foo>{ ``[&<]`` }</foo> } ) With recent versions of BaseX, you can also use simple backticks (that’s XQuery 4 syntax, it will be documented soon). The following queries are equivalent: `&` ``[&]`` "&" Hope this helps, Christian