>   Hi everyone. I'm trying to to populate an xsl:variable with an xsl:value-of,
>   as follows:
>
>	   <xsl:variable name="pid"><xsl:value-of
>   select="ancestor::PID"/></xsl:variable>
>
>   The xml looks something like this:
>
>   <PID>1
>	   <desc>blah blah</desc>
>   </PID>
>
>   The trouble is, <PID> is an element, with children, but I just want it's
>   text value - i.e. I want my variable to contain "1", not a string
>   representation of the whole tree!
>
>   And, no, I can't just make the PID value an attr of PID *sigh*
>
>   Pls help!!!

<xsl:variable name="pid"><xsl:value-of
   select="ancestor::PID[1]/text()[1]"/></xsl:variable>

Or probably you want the variable to contain the text node directly
rather than a result tree fragment, in which case


<xsl:variable name="pid"  select="ancestor::PID[1]/text()[1]"/>

In both cases this will give 1 followed by some white space, if you care
about that, you might want normalize-space(ancestor::PID[1]/text()[1])


David


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list