Well, I am a little confused. Please bear with me as I
try to explain.

My XML does not have "colnum" as an attrinute to 'colspec".

It only has "colname",

and the "entry" tag
has the "namest" and "namend". The "colname" tag has
names of the columns like "c1", "c2" etc. So how the
XML for entry will have
<entry namest="c1" namend="c9">

Right.  That is typical of OASIS/CALS
tables.  Many of us have seen a lot of this.

How do you achieve column span using these column
names instead of column numbers in xslt?

Thank you for all your patience and help.

You are welcome, but it seems you did not even
try using my previous answer to this same
question.  I outlined an untested example of the
kind of code you need to answer your
question.  At which part of using my example did you have problems?

Below is the same example, but polished up with
your actual test data from your earlier post to
illustrate what I gave you in my last post.  This
code is actually tested.  It takes more time to
volunteer a tested working solution than to
answer inquiries of the general direction to take when solving a problem.

The code below determines the number of columns
being spanned by the namest= and nameend=
attributes when the current node is <entry>, and
assigns the value to the colspan= attribute.

What part of the example in my earlier email, as
modified below, didn't work for you?

T:\ftemp>type meenakshi.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<table tocentry="Y">
<tgroup align="left" charoff="50" cols="4">
<colspec colname="c1" colwidth="1.50in">
 </colspec>
<colspec colname="c2" colwidth="2.0in">
 </colspec>
<colspec colname="c3" colwidth="3.0in">
 </colspec>
        <colspec colname="c4" colwidth="1in">
 </colspec>
        <tbody valign="top">
          <row>
            <entry namest="c1" nameend="c3"/>
            <entry namest="c1" nameend="c2"/>
            <entry namest="c2" nameend="c3"/>
          </row>
        </tbody>
      </tgroup>
    </table>
T:\ftemp>type meenakshi.xsl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                version="1.0">

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:for-each select="//entry">
    <test colspan="{
            count(ancestor::table[1]/*/colspec[@colname=current()/@nameend]/
                  preceding-sibling::colspec ) -
            count(ancestor::table[1]/*/colspec[@colname=current()/@namest]/
                  preceding-sibling::colspec )
                   + 1 }"/>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

T:\ftemp>xslt meenakshi.xml meenakshi.xsl con
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<test colspan="3"/>
<test colspan="2"/>
<test colspan="2"/>
T:\ftemp>

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