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Re: Patterns and location paths

• From: Richard Tobin <richard@c...>
• To: James Clark <jjc@j...>, xml-dev@i...
• Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 10:21:44 +0100 (BST)

> That's not correct: foo//bar[5] selects any bar element that is a
> descendant of a foo child of the current node and that is the fifth bar
> child of its parent.

Good, that's what I initially expected.

> What exactly in the draft led you to think otherwise?

My interpretation is as follows:

 "foo" selects the foo children of the current node

 For each of these, "//" selects its descendants

 "bar" filters these to select the bar descendants

 The predicate "[5]" is evaluated "with the complete list of nodes to be
 filtered as the context node list" (6.1.3) - ie, all the bar descendants
 of the current foo node.  "5" is equivalent to "position()=5", and 
 "position()" returns the position of the node in the context node
 list (6.2.2).  So it selects the fifth of all the bar descendants.
 
This is not what I said in my previous message - I was wrongly taking
the context list to be all the bar descendants of all the foo children,
rather than evaluating //bar[5] separately for each foo.  But it's still
not what you say above.

And an example in section 6.1 seems to confirm my (revised) interpretation:

  /from-descendants(figure[position()=42]) selects the forty-second
  figure element in the document

It doesn't say "selects any figure element that is the 42nd child of
its parent".

Am I still confused?

-- Richard

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