Cross-referencing

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the response to my previous post,
I managed to realise what I'd done wrong. Now I've got a bit
more of a thorny problem...

Consider the following xml file:

<taxa>
  <character-list>
    <character number="1">
	  <state number="1">no legs</state>
	  <state number="2">2 legs</state>
	  <state number="3">4 legs</state>
    </character>
  </character-list>
  <item id="1">
	<item-name>Chicken</item-name>
	<attribute-list>
		<attribute character="1"><value>2</value></attribute>
	</attribute-list>
  </item>
  <item id="2">
	<item-name>Worm</item-name>
	<attribute-list>
		<attribute character="1"><value>1</value></attribute>
	</attribute-list>
  </item>
</taxa>

I want to produce a stylesheet that will print out the descriptions
of each animal (item). An item has a list of attributes, which can
have a particular value (sometimes more than one, and in a range, but
ignore this for now). Each value corresponds to a state within
a character (so in the above example a chicken has two legs, and
a worm has none).

I'm attempting to write a statement to grab the text of a state after
matching the value in the attribute.

e.g.
<xsl:template match="value">
	<xsl:value-of select="...return the text of the corresponding state..." />
</xsl:template>

I've gotten as far as pulling out the character number from the
attribute parent:

ancestor-or-self::attribute/@character

(which gives '1' in the above example).

I then want to grab the text from the right state in the right character.
I tried something like:

//character[@number='ancestor-or-self::attribute/@character']/state[@number=
"text()"]

...which if I understand things correctly, should select state
elements whose number attribute is equal to the text of the
current node (which is a value element), and whose
character parent has a number attribute whose value matches the
chararacter attribute of my (the current nodes) parent.
(Confusing huh?).

Any suggestions on this? I thought I was pretty close, but
XT just whirrs away for a while and comes back with nothing.
(parser is IBMs XML4J).

Thanks!

L.

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