$values[.] obviously doesn't work because the value of the context item within
square brackets is different from the value outside.
The fact that the value of "." is context-dependent often causes difficulties
like this, but it's fundamental to the design of XPath..
The real culprit here is the overloading of A[B] to do both subscripting and
filtering. Changing the focus is necessary for filtering, but it gets in the
way for subscripting. I would argue that this is a design mistake (in fact, I
tried to argue this before XPath 1.0 was finalized) but it's impossible to
change it now. For 4.0, however, I would like to see better ways of accessing
items in a sequence by position, and there has been much discussion about how
best to achiieve this.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
On 14 Mar 2021, at 18:04, Michael Müller-Hillebrand mmh(_at_)docufy(_dot_)de
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
Folks,
Given a variable with a sequence of values
<xsl:variable name="values" select="(1,2,3,4,5)" as="xs:double+"/>
these are three methods to report its content
<xsl:sequence select="for $i in 1 to count($values) return $values[$i]"/>
<xsl:for-each select="1 to count($values)">
<xsl:sequence select="$values[.]"/>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:for-each select="1 to count($values)">
<xsl:sequence select="$values[current()]"/>
</xsl:for-each>
The first works as expected, the second does not, but the third astonishingly
enough gives me the same result as the first. Check it out:
https://xsltfiddle.liberty-development.net/ei5R4v8/2
I read/understand that there is a difference between a for expression and a
path expression, but since we can use atomized values in xsl:for-each, I
would like to see more similarity between for and for-each.
Should this be on the wishlist for XSLT 4 or do I have to learn/understand
some more concepts?
Puzzled greeting,
- Michael
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