Hi Dave,
Given this, the fact that you're getting an error highlights for you
the fact that in XSLT 1.0 you're only testing the first of the rows
for content whereas you actually want to test if "all the cells are
empty" or, in other words, if any of the cells has content. For the
test to succeed when any of the $rows has content, you should use:
count($rows) = 3 and $rows[normalize-space(.)]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Curious about that last one Jeni.
Implies that the formatter iterate over the $rows sequence
normalising content as if there had been a for .... statement, then
apply 'or' function to the result.
I don't really understand what you're asking, or what you mean by
"formatter" in this context.
The predicate works in XSLT 2.0 just as it does in XSLT 1.0 -- it
filters the sequence of nodes held in the $rows variable to include
only those for which the test "normalize-space(.)" is true. The test
"normalize-space(.)" will be true for those nodes in $rows that have
non-whitespace characters in their string values. The fact that the
resulting sequence of nodes is used as an argument to the "and"
operator means that the sequence is interpreted as a boolean value --
true if the sequence contains items and false otherwise. Therefore if
there are any nodes left after the filtering (i.e. any nodes that have
non-whitespace characters in their string values) then it will be
true.
To make the boolean casts explicit, the above is the same as:
count($rows) = 3 and boolean($rows[boolean(normalize-space(.))])
If you want to reinterpret that as a "some" expression, it's:
count($rows) = 3 and
some $r in $rows satisfies normalize-space($r)
or as a "for" expression:
count($rows) = 3 and
for $r in $rows return if (normalize-space($r)) then $r else ()
Since we know that there are three nodes in $rows, it's the same as:
count($rows) = 3 and
(normalize-space($rows[1]) or
normalize-space($rows[2]) or
normalize-space($rows[3]))
As far as what a processor would do, an optimised processor would most
likely iterate over the nodes in $rows until it found one for which
normalize-space(.) returned a non-empty string, and then return true
for the sub-expression.
Cheers,
Jeni
---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list