Hi Kenneth,
Actually, the real problem is for me to write an XPath expression
that will select all children of "main" from the first "first" upto
(but exluding) the next "first". Hence my desire to locate the
position of the next "first".
The easiest way to do this is to create a key that indexes all the
non-<first> children of the <main> element by their nearest preceding
<first> element:
<xsl:key name="first-group"
match="main/*[not(self::first)]"
use="generate-id(preceding-sibling::first[1])" />
Then you can get all the elements that 'belong to' the first <first>
element using:
key('first-group', generate-id(/main/first[1]))
I'm using generate-id() here, but your actual XML might have an id
attribute or something similar that you could use to uniquely identify
the <first> elements instead.
If you're trying to transform into:
<main>
<first>
<second>
<third>...</third>
</second>
<second>
<third>...</third>
</second>
</first>
<first>
<second>...</second>
</first>
</main>
and you're using XSLT 2.0, then you want to use the
<xsl:for-each-group> with group-starting-with. In XSLT 1.0 using keys
like the one above is probably the simplest approach.
Cheers,
Jeni
---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/