Hi Richard,

Newlines (i.e., whitespace-only, non-empty strings) were treated identically to the "." file reference. As you can also supply absolute and relative file and directory paths as arguments for the -i flag, the factbook.xml file, which is located in a descendant directory of your current directory, was opened instead and bound to the context item.

This special case will now be checked. In addition, the error message for empty strings will now be suppressed. Feel free to check out the latest stable snapshot [1].

Best, Christian

[1] http://files.basex.org/releases/latest/

Further clarification/correction to what I reported:

• When I said "empty string", in fact the "problem" arises when standard input is _not_ empty, but includes just a blank line.
• When standard input is empty, I get an exception NoSuchElementException. That is probably acceptable: at least, it is better than getting output that has nothing to do with the input data.
• When I said "one of my databases", I think that _may_ have been wrong. It may be content from an XML file in the current directory (or, as you'll see below, from some part of the distribution) ... I can't easily tell.

What follows was done on a Mac; "$" is a placeholder for the shell prompt.

Three tests:

• The first test shows what I expected to be the behaviour for data read from standard input.
• The second test shows when standard input is empty (echo -n ''): an exception.
• The third test shows when standard input contains just a blank line (echo ''): it seems to read from the factbook.xml data (from basex/etc/factbook.xml?)

$ mkdir basex-report $ cd basex-report $ wget http://files.basex.org/releases/9.0.2/BaseX902.zip ... output omitted ... $ unzip BaseX902.zip Archive: BaseX902.zip extracting: basex/.basexhome inflating: basex/BaseX.jar creating: basex/bin/ inflating: basex/bin/basex inflating: basex/bin/basex.bat ... etc. $ echo '<x />' | basex/bin/basex -i- -q '.' /Users/rwalker/basex-report/basex/.basex: writing new configuration file. <x/>$ <-- shell prompt printed immediately after output $ echo -n '' | basex/bin/basex -i- -q '.' Exception in thread "main" java.util.NoSuchElementException at java.util.Scanner.throwFor(Scanner.java:862) at java.util.Scanner.next(Scanner.java:1371) at org.basex.util.MainParser.string(MainParser.java:110) at org.basex.BaseX.parseArgs(BaseX.java:235) at org.basex.core.CLI.<init>(CLI.java:50) at org.basex.BaseX.<init>(BaseX.java:55) at org.basex.BaseX.main(BaseX.java:42) $ echo '' | basex/bin/basex -i- -q '.'

<mondial> <continent id="f0_119" name="Europe"/> <continent id="f0_123" name="Asia"/> <continent id="f0_126" name="America"/> <continent id="f0_129" name="Australia/Oceania"/> <continent id="f0_132" name="Africa"/> <country id="f0_136" name="Albania" capital="f0_1461" population="3249136" datacode="AL" total_area="28750" population_growth="1.34" infant_mortality="49.2" gdp_agri="55" gdp_total="4100" inflation="16" indep_date="28 11 1912" government="emerging democracy" car_code="AL"> <name>Albania</name> <city id="f0_1461" country="f0_136" longitude="10.7" latitude="46.2"> <name>Tirane</name> ... etc.