XQuery for eXist - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 119

For the XSLT programmers among us who think this sounds familiar: you're right. In
XSLT, serialization is controlled likewise through the xsl:output element.
Controlling Serialization
There are a number of ways you can control serialization from within your XQuery
scripts:
option exist:serialize
You can control serialization by adding a declare option exist:serialize
statement to the XQuery prolog. For instance:
declare option exist:serialize
"method=html media-type=text/html indent=no" ;
The contents of the exist:serialize option are a whitespace-separated list of
name/value pairs, as described inthe following section. You do not have to define
the exist namespace prefix. eXist automatically binds this to the appropriate
http://exist.sourceforge.net/NS/exist namespace.
util:get-option , util:declare-option
These extension functions allow you to inspect and set the value of an XQuery
script option programmatically. For instance, setting the serialization options
can be done with:
util:declare-option ( "exist:serialize" ,
"method=html media-type=text/html indent=no" )
XQuery 3.0 serialization settings
eXist now also supports the standard XQuery 3.0 way of controlling serialization.
This is described in “Serialization” on page 115 .
Serialization Options
This section will list all the serialization options that eXist supports.
General serialization options
The more general serialization options closely mimic the options of the same name
available on the XSLT xsl:output command:
method=xml|microxml|xhtml|html5|text|json
Sets the principal serialization method.
The microxml method produces MicroXML as opposed to full XML. You can
find out more about MicroXML from the W3C MicroXML Community Group .