On Thu, 4 Sep 2003 Jarno(_dot_)Elovirta(_at_)nokia(_dot_)com wrote:
Hi,
<a>
<b attr='whatever' ... </b>
<b attr='more' ... </b>
<b attr='yadda yadda' ... </b>
</a>
and i'd like to use another template to process the (string)
values of the (set of) "attr" attributes.
if i'm already processing the <a> element, i can certainly
create a node-set of the appropriate attribute nodes with:
<xsl:variable name="set" select="b/@attr"/>
that will give me a node-set of attribute nodes and, when i
pass these to another template, that template will be responsible
for taking the string value of each attribute node to do further
processing.
on the other hand, would it be any faster or more elegant to
use an expression to create a node-set of text nodes corresponding
to those attribute values right off the bat so that all i'm
passing is a set of text nodes?
Unlike in DOM, XPath attributes don't contain their textual value as a
text node child, but rather it's just their value, see
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#attribute-nodes>. So the only way is to pass
the attribute nodes themselves.
i thought as much, i just wasn't sure i was missing something obvious.
just to explain what my motivation is, i'm trying to fix a bug in
docbook stylesheets, which requires me to do the following. given
the XML:
<a>
<b attr="w1 w3 w6">...</b>
<b attr="w2 w12 w3 w7">...</b>
... more <b>s here ...
</a>
when processing an <a> element, i need to calculate the maximum
number of whitespace-separated words for any "b/@attr" attribute.
so just what you see above, the value would be 4, based on that
second <b> child of <a>.
AFAICT, this will involve three steps:
1) collect the "b/@attr" attributes (easy)
2) normalize space and word count each of those attribute values
(again, easy, stealing from kay, p. 527, the "word-count"
template :-)
3) finding the maximum of those values
since, as i understand it, you can't have a node-set of just numbers,
i'm assuming that i'll just have to do steps 2) and 3) recursively.
no, i don't want the solution, i need the challenge and the practice,
unless there's a clever feature of XSLT i would be overlooking to
do this elegantly.
rday
p.s. i am curious about the cute way of finding the minimum of
a set of nodes shown in mangano, p. 63:
<xsl:value-of select="$nodes[not($nodes < .)]" />
what puzzles me is that, while this is clearly processing a node-set,
you can't (IIRC) have a node-set of just numbers. so whatever the
types of the nodes in that node-set, they must be automatically
converted to numbers, yes? so they might be text nodes whose
string values correspond to numeric values, or something like that.
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