The following table describes the argument for this command:

Argument	Required/Optional	Description
arg	Required	The sequence of atomic values.
collation	Optional	The collation to use for comparing strings.

Returns a sequence where duplicate values in

$arg

have been removed, keeping only one instance for each set of values that are equal (

eq

) to each other. Values of type

xs:untypedAtomic

are treated as

xs:string

for comparison purposes. If values cannot be compared because the

eq

operator is not defined for their types, these values are treated as distinct. The order of the returned sequence may vary depending on the implementation.

Consider the following XML sample:

let $in-xml :=	
<in-xml>
  <a>3</a>
  <b>5</b>
  <b>3</b>
</in-xml>

The following table lists some sample values and return values based on the above snippet:

SAMPLE FUNCTION	OUTPUT
fn:distinct-values( ('a', 'b', 'a') )	('a', 'b')
fn:distinct-values( (1, 2, 3) )	(1, 2, 3)
fn:distinct-values( ('a', 2, 3) )	('a', 2, 3)
fn:distinct-values( (xs:integer('1'), xs:decimal('1.0'), xs:float('1.0E0') ) )	1
fn:distinct-values($in-xml/*)	(3, 5)
fn:distinct-values( () )	()