Re: counting characters in an XML document

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Subject: Re: counting characters in an XML document
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 17:12:19 -0400

Tom:

Mike B. has already pointed out that this is more problematic than it may seem on the surface.

If you want to count the number of characters *just in text nodes*, you can use the XPath expression string-length(/) to get a count. (The root node, taken as a string, is the concatenation of all the text nodes in the document.) I am leaving aside complexities of counting Unicode combining characters together or separately, etc.: most (all) processors will just give a straight character count, I think.

Also, whitespace characters such as line feeds, extra space to indent elements, etc. will be counted unless you strip them with <xsl:strip-space elements="..."/>.

Counting the length of the text might be a useful alternative for your purposes to counting elements.

Cheers,
Wendell

At 03:10 PM 10/24/01, you wrote:

Hi,
Does anyone know how I can use XSL to count the number of characters in an
XML document. I want to process the XML so that, if there are less than a
certain amount of characters, a certain message gets printed. Another option
could be counting number of tags (elements)

any ideas out there?

Thanks,

Tom

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

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Current Thread
counting characters in an XML document Tom Melkonian - Wed, 24 Oct 2001 15:20:58 -0400 (EDT) Mike Brown - Wed, 24 Oct 2001 16:15:13 -0400 (EDT) Steve . Ball - Wed, 24 Oct 2001 17:16:31 -0400 (EDT) Wendell Piez - Wed, 24 Oct 2001 17:14:26 -0400 (EDT) <= Michael Kay - Thu, 25 Oct 2001 07:15:49 -0400 (EDT) Wendell Piez - Thu, 25 Oct 2001 12:35:17 -0400 (EDT)

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