Dear Wolfhart,
On 7/7/2011 12:55 AM, Wolfhart Totschnig wrote:
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)">
Yes, but that will fail if you have two persons, one with the same last
and first names and another with the same last and middle names ...
The reason this is hard is that "equality" for node comparison purposes
is impossible to specify adequately for the general case (largely but
not entirely due to whitespace-related issues), so even a good general
definition (such as in 2.0 deep-equal()) is only somewhat useful. So
more powerful means have to be applied.
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!
I think part of the reason why XSLT 1.0 was so successful was that they
limited the scope to a set of problems already well understood,
deliberately leaving it to be filled out later. If they had tried to be
more comprehensive and general, they might well have botched it. (Plus,
we wouldn't have the useful alignment with XQuery as well as other
advantages.)
In other words, XSLT 2.0 is the correct approach even from the XSLT 1.0
point of view.
Cheers, Wendell
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Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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