xQuery LIKE-operator?

Question

Is there any way to perform a LIKE operation with XQuery in the same way as with SQL?

I wan't to construct some "startswith", "endswith" and "contains"-expressions.

Example of what I want to achieve:

for $x in /user where $x/firstname LIKE '%xxx' return $x
for $x in /user where $x/middlename LIKE 'xxx%' return $x 
for $x in /user where $x/lastname LIKE '%xxx%' return $x

Is there any way to achieve this in XQuery?

EDIT:

Got the answer to the question above. New problem:

Would there be any way to do this the opposite way around? I would like to run those queries with the sql equivalent NOT LIKE operator. Is this possible? It has to be in an FLWOR-expression

EDIT2:

Solved the problem. You can run fn:not(starts-with('123', '1')) and it returns false.

Answer 1

XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 (as standardized by the W3C) have regular expression support with the matches function http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions/#func-matches:

/user[matches(firstname, 'xxx$')]

And of course there are functions like starts-with and contains (both in XPath 1.0/2.0), and ends-with (only in XPath 2.0) that might suffice.