Re: get immediat preceeding node, if it is a comment

> It seems that any predicates after the positional predicate refer to
> that node, not to the node that the predicates before the positional
> predicate refer to... 

yes but that's a special case. You can have any number of [] predicates
in a step and after each one the remaining nodes in the current node
list are those nodes for which the predicate was true.  while evaluating
the next [] position() and last() and count() all refer to the current
node list (ie the list of nodes that have survivied any previous []
predicates in the step)


> preceding-sibling::node()[normalize-space()][1][self::comment()]
> 
> this gets 'test1' and 'test3' as we would expect

anything that involves [1] (anywhere) will select a node set of at most
one node. Your description in english suggests you used the expression

*/preceding-sibling::node()[normalize-space()][1][self::comment()]

while <root> is your current node.

ie find all children that have the stated condition.

> So is it the case that all predicates to the right of the positional
> predicate refer to that node? (they change the context node)

Yes but there is nothing special about the positional predicate it is
just shorthand for the boolean test [position()=1].
All later predicates refer to nodes for which earlier predicates are
true.

David

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