query_to_xml() returns invalid XML when query returns no rows

[Thomas Kellerer]

I am not sure if this qualifies as a bug: 

query_to_xml() returns an empty XML document when the query returns no rows, 
e.g:

   select query_to_xml('select 42 where false', false, true, '');

The problem with this is, that if the resulting XML is then fed into e.g. the 
xpath() function, that function fails because the "empty" document is an 
invalid XML:

So the following query:

    select xpath('/row/col/text()', query_to_xml('select 42 as col where 
false', false, true, ''));

fails with "ERROR:  could not parse XML document"

I would have expected query_to_xml() to return NULL if the query returns no 
rows, rather than an invalid XML document.

Note that IS DOCUMENT is false for the empty XML returned, so it can be trapped 
in a query. 
But if query_to_xml() is nested somehow (like the above) this is really 
complicated to apply and I find it a bit surprising that query_to_xml() returns 
invalid XML at all

Tested with 10.2 on Windows 10

Thomas