<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <?xml-stylesheet href="../make-menu.xsl" type="text/xsl"?><html> <head> <this-is section="expressions" page="range" subpage=""/> <!-- Generated at 2011-12-09T20:47:22.916Z--><title>Saxonica: XSLT and XQuery Processing: Range expressions</title> <meta name="coverage" content="Worldwide"/> <meta name="copyright" content="Copyright Saxonica Ltd"/> <meta name="title" content="Saxonica: XSLT and XQuery Processing: Range expressions"/> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/> <link rel="stylesheet" href="../saxondocs.css" type="text/css"/> </head> <body class="main"> <h1>Range expressions</h1> <p>The expression <code>E1 to E2</code> returns a sequence of integers. For example, <code>1 to 5</code> returns the sequence <code>1, 2, 3, 4, 5</code>. This is useful in <code>for</code> expressions, for example the first five nodes of a node sequence can be processed by writing <code>for $i in 1 to 5 return (//x)[$i]</code>.</p> <p>If you prefer, you can write this as <code>(//x)[position() = 1 to 5]</code>. This works because comparison of a single integer (<code>position()</code>) to a sequence of integers (<code>1 to 5</code>) is true if the integer on the left is equal to any integer in the sequence.</p> <table width="100%"> <tr> <td> <p align="right"><a class="nav" href="comparisons.xml">Next</a></p> </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>