MySQL Bugs: #25703: XML: ExtractValue() user-specified multiple match delimiter

Bug #25703	XML: ExtractValue() user-specified multiple match delimiter
Submitted:	18 Jan 2007 19:14	Modified:	1 Apr 2009 11:27
Reporter:	Travis Haagen	Email Updates:
Status:	Verified	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: XML functions	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	5.1, 6.0.9	OS:	Windows (Win32)
Assigned to:	Assigned Account	CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	DELIMITER, ExtractValue, Frq: XML

Description:
For ExtractValue(), the documentation states that:

"If multiple matches are found, then the content of the first child text node of each matching element is returned (in the order matched) as a single, space-delimited string."

Using a space as a delimiter doesn't work very well when the results each contain numerous spaces. I propose an overloaded version of ExtractValue() that allows one to optionally specify the delimiter used when multiple results are returned. It could be of the form:

    ExtractValue(xml_frag, xpath_expr, delimiter)

The escape characters listed in section 9.1.1 of the MySQL manual should ideally be supported as valid delimiter values.

How to repeat:
N/A

As an example, the following XPath expression returns three results, each seperated by a space, but each also contain a space:

mysql> SELECT ExtractValue(
    ->     "<a><b>the first</b><b>the second</b></a><a><b>the third</b></a>",
    ->     "//b") AS RESULT;
+--------------------------------+
| RESULT                         |
+--------------------------------+
| the first the second the third |
+--------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Thank you for the feature request.

Any chance this feature will be in an upcoming 5.1 release? How can I make this change myself?

The current behavior is shockingly bad. Please at least change the delimiter to something like tab. It is unusable the way it it now.

15 years passed and still no solution to this absolutely stupid problem. Another one proof that mysql developers do not give a shit about the quality of their product.