Re: Finding parent of the middle child

On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 13:21 -0700, Brook Ellingwood wrote:
> I'm having a hard time breaking a list of nested elements into a
> two-column layout in HTML output.
> 
> There are several section elements containing a variable number of
> child elements. I want to return a count of all the child elements and
> identify the mid point of all the child elements. At the top of my
> XSL, I do this with:
> 
> <xsl:variable name="gearMid">
> 	<xsl:value-of select="round(count(//rec_gear_sec/*) div 2)"/>
> </xsl:variable>
> 
> This returns "34."
> 
> Next, I want to identify which parent element contains the child at
> position 34, so I can split the list beginning with the following
> sibling. However, I can't even get as far as finding the matching
> child when I try a similar method to returning the count:
> 
> <xsl:variable name="gearSplit">
> 	<xsl:value-of select="//rec_gear_sec/*[position() = $gearMid]"/>
> </xsl:variable>
> 
> That returns nothing. When I substitute numbers for the variable, I
> discover that it's matching the first child element at that position
> *within its parent element* not within the list of all child elements.
> Even though this is behavior that I've used and expected in the past,
> I'm now confused as to why the context is interpreted differently for
> those two matches.

Quick pointer. version="2.0", right?

What you're looking for is:

(//rec_gear_sec/*)[$gearMid]

I also, against my better judgement, found it tempting to disbelieve the
spec about dynamic context sometimes until I realized how easy it is to
manipulate sequences.

sdc