Re: parsing a complex xml tree into simple trees (a c

 <xsl:param name="a" select=".//text()[contains(.,',')][1]"/>
would be better as
                             descendant::text()[contains(.,',')][1]

which does what I intended (select the first node with a comma)
although actually i think it doesn't make any difference here
as $a is always used where XSLT1's implied first-node semantics
will mean that the extra nodes that are selected when // is used don't
do any harm. XSLT2 would be less forgiving:-)

change version=1.0 to 2.0 and you get

$ saxon8 chops.xml chops.xsl
Error on line 16 of file:/c:/tmp/chops.xsl:
  XPTY0004: A sequence of more than one item is not allowed as the first argument of generate-id()
Transformation failed: Run-time errors were reported

(if you leave the version attribute as "1.0" saxon8 runs in xslt1 compat
mode and produces the same result I posted earlier.)

David

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