Hi Folks,
Thanks David, Dimitre, and Michael for your excellent feedback.
Let's recap the 3 ways to implement using XPath a boolean test that there are
no duplicates in a list of items.
Problem: Write an XPath expression that returns true if there are no duplicate
websites in the following list, false otherwise:
<Websites>
<Website id="Amazon"> http://www.amazon.com </Website>
<Website id="Apple"> http://www.apple.com </Website>
<Website id="Ebay"> http://www.ebay.com </Website>
<Website id="Google"> http://www.google.com </Website>
<Website id="Microsoft"> http://www.microsoft.com </Website>
<Website id="VirginAtlantic"> http://www.virgin-atlantic.com </Website>
</Websites>
Here's how to implement it in XPath 1.0 and in XPath 2.0.
XPath 1.0:
not(Websites/*[. = preceding-sibling::*])
XPath 2.0:
empty(Websites/*[index-of(../*,.)[2]])
count(Websites/*) = count(distinct-values(Websites/*))
The preferred XPath is the last one because it has the best performance. The
first two take on the order of n-squared time (where n is the number of
websites in the list) whereas the last XPath expression takes on the order of n
log n time.
/Roger
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