Re: Selecting all nodes between pairs of <br> tags

<xsl:template name="stat">
<xsl:param name="nodeset" />
<xsl:if test="not((local-name($nodeset[1]) = 'br') and
(local-name($nodeset[2]) = 'br'))">
  <!-- do something with the node; i.e $nodeset[1] -->
  <xsl:call-template name="stat">
    <xsl:with-param name="nodeset" select="$nodeset[position &gt; 1]" />
  </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

I could not give this code earlier because your source XML data was
not enough for me to formulate this solution.

Regards,
Duncan

On 6/16/06, Duncan Anker <danker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi List,

I am still having trouble grasping some of the more subtle points of
XPath. Consider the following HTML:

...
<br><br>
<b>A</b>B<br>
...
<br><br>
C
<br><br>
<div>
...

Following the advice of Mukul Gandhi given me a few weeks ago, I use
match="br[local-name(preceding-sibling::node()[1]) = 'br'][1]" (I am
using xsltproc with the --html option, which I suspect is normalizing
the spaces so this is slightly modified from the sample given):

I then select the nodes following with
select="following-sibling::node()[normalize-space != '']" - this is then
passed into a template which which outputs the A and B elements (I
handle these explicitly, which may be cheating, because I can't figure
out how to stop at <br> and I know the format of the data).

This is all well and good, except that my output comes out like this:

<ul>
<li><label>A</label>B</li>
...
<li><label>C</label></li>
<b>A</b><br> ...

Currently, the selection of following siblings seems to select up to the
3rd <br> pair. This in itself is slightly odd, since I would have
thought it would select everything following at the same level, although
it appears to stop at the div tag, so perhaps the match ends there for
some pre-determined reason. In any case, I would like it to stop at the
second <br> tag pair - it seems like using a following-sibling rule
inside a predicate won't work easily since elements after the 2nd <br>
pair are followed by the 3rd <br> pair, so would still be included.
There must be some way to specify all following siblings up to <br><br>
and excluding anything after the <br><br> but the thought of what that
expression might look like is making my eyes glaze.

The other problem is the labels being output afterwards - it would seem
that this is matching where the previous template leaves off. I don't
understand why it outputs only the label and not the following data. Any
suggestions?

The relevant template:

<xsl:template match="br[local-name(preceding-sibling::node()[1]) = 'br'][1]">

<ul>

<xsl:call-template name="stat">

<xsl:with-param name="nodeset"

select="following-sibling::node()[normalize-space() != '']" />

</xsl:call-template>

</ul>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="stat">

<xsl:param name="nodeset" />

<xsl:for-each select="$nodeset[position() mod 2 = 1]">

<li>

<label><xsl:value-of select="." /></label>

<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(following-sibling::text())" />

</li>

</xsl:for-each>

</xsl:template>

Thanks in advance.
Duncan