Re: help on removing duplicates

> i want to get a list of the first level nodes (A, B, C..) with their related
> nodes (X, Y, Z...) but removing duplicates, so i'd like to get:
>        A-XY
>        B-X
>        ...

...

> as i don't have tight performance problems i don't need to resort to
> muenchian methods,

But they do work well so why not use them if you can?
They make a good pattern, which, if you master it, can be used in many
situations (until XSLT 2.0 becomes widely available!)

But if you want to avoid key() and generate-id() and don't care about performance:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="xml/el[not(node =
following::el[parent::xml]/node)]" />
  </xsl:template>
  
  <xsl:template match="/xml/el">
    <xsl:variable name="base" select="node" />
    <xsl:text>
    </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="$base" />
    <xsl:text>-</xsl:text>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="/xml/el/rel/el[../../node = $base and
not(node = following::el[../../node = $base and node = current()/node])]" />
  </xsl:template>
  
  <xsl:template match="/xml/el/rel/el">
    <xsl:value-of select="node" />
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>