Hi,
Thanks to all who responded!
For my particular case, I found a less complicated solution than
Wendell's, but it's a particular solution, not a general one:
<xsl:variable name="last" select="last"/>
<xsl:if test="path/person/last=last and (not(first) or
path/person[last=$last]/first=first) and (not(middle) or
path/person[last=$last]/middle=middle)">
I am amazed that there is no simple general solution for this kind of
problem in XSLT 1.0. I thought I must be overlooking something obvious.
XSLT 2.0 indeed makes life easier!
Thanks again,
Wolfhart
Wendell Piez wrote:
Hi,
A generalization of Michael's suggestion is to use a mode in which
each element is processed to write strings, and then compare the strings.
So:
<xsl:variable name="author-string">
<!-- generating an RTF containing a string -->
<xsl:apply-templates select="$author" mode="string"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="person-string">
<!-- again -->
<xsl:apply-templates select="$person" mode="string"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:if test="$author-string = $person-string"> ...
You can then manage how each string is generated, for purposes of
comparison, using templates matching in the mode. (You will find you
need to do some of this in order, for example, to normalize whitespace.)
To compare an author to more than one person, wrap your calls in a
template that writes a result string you can test for. So:
<xsl:template name="compare-person">
<xsl:param name="author" select="/.."/>
<xsl:param name="person" select="."/>
<xsl:variable name="author-string">
<xsl:apply-templates select="$author" mode="string"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="person-string">
<xsl:apply-templates select="$person" mode="string"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:if test="$author-string = $person-string"> TRUE </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
Then:
<xsl:template match="author">
<xsl:variable name="author" select="."/>
<xsl:variable name="compare-result">
<xsl:for-each select="$persons">
<!-- generating an RTF containing a string,
possibly including 'TRUE' -->
<xsl:call-template name="compare-person">
<xsl:with-param name="author" select="$author">
</xsl:call-template>
<xsl:for-each>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:if test="contains($compare-result,'TRUE')"> ...
Note this doesn't tell you which of your persons is (are) the same as
your author. For that you have to work harder (there are ways).
This little exercise in XSLT 1.0 may well convince you that life is
easier under XSLT 2.0.
Cheers,
Wendell
On 7/6/2011 4:22 PM, Michael Müller-Hillebrand wrote:
Am 06.07.2011 um 20:54 schrieb Wolfhart Totschnig:
I have a seemingly simple xslt problem to which I cannot find the
solution. I want to test whether the context node, which is
an<author> element with the form (first?, middle?, last), is equal
to one of a set of<person> elements. By "equal" I mean having the
same child elements and values of these elements. At first, I
thought it would be as easy as
test="path/person = ."
But then I realized that the "=" operator compares the string values
of the nodes
Wolfhart,
How about this (not very cool):
test="concat(path/person/first, '|', path/person/first, '|',
path/person/first)
= concat(first, '|', middle, '|', last)"
- Michael Müller-Hillebrand
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