Hi,
I was under the impression that descendant:: and // are
exactly the same.
No. "// is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/"
<http://localhost/TR/xpath/#path-abbrev>.
I wrote this very simple stylesheet to
extract the last occurance of the ORD element. But it doesnt
work if I use //, instead if descendant:: is used, it works just fine.
// ends up printing 'dummy' >Ist occurance of ORD
Can somebody explain, the reason
Thanks
--sony
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
xmlns="http://www.bellsouth.com/clipwfac";
xmlns:idm="http://www.bellsouth.com/idm";
exclude-result-prefixes="idm">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"
indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:value-of select=".//idm:ORD[last()]"/>
The unabbreviated expression is
self::node()/descendant-or-self::node()/child::idm:ORD[position() = last()]
Thus, "self::node()/descendant-or-self::node()/child::idm:ORD" will select both
ORD element nodes. The predicate "position() = last()" will be true for both
elements, because the predicate is applied to the "child::idm:ORD" step. Thus,
you end up with both ORD elements. xsl:value-of will then use the first one in
document order and you end up with the dummy.
<xsl:value-of
select="descendant::idm:ORD[last()]"/>
Here, on the other hand, the predicte is applied to "descendant::idm:ORD" step
and you get the last ORD element in the document.
Cheers,
Jarno - Madam Zu: March 2004