On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> if para2 is an empty element, then the regex success and
>> return an empty string. How do I express in my regex that
>> empty is a non-matching regex ?
>>
>
> Further to Joe's response: analyze-string partitions the input string into a
> sequence of substrings, passing substrings that match the regex to
> xsl:matching-substring and those that don't match to
> xsl:non-matching-substring. If the input is empty, there will be no
> substrings, therefore no calls on either xsl:matching-substring or
> xsl:non-matching-substring.
>
> If you want to test whether the string as a whole matches the regex, use the
> matches() function.

Ok I think I am getting closer now. My goal is simply to recursively
iterate over preceeding <para> element in search for a matching regex.
I must have made a mistake with the recusion calls...

<article>
<para>C.1. section</para>
<para>C.1.1 section</para>
<para>bla</para>
<para>C.1.1.1 section</para> <!-- correct solution -->
<para>foo</para>
<para/>
<para>bar</para>
<table>mytable</table>
</article>

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
  <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:variable name="myregex">^([CF]\.[0-9\.]+)\s*(.*)$</xsl:variable>
  <xsl:template name="get-section-reference">
    <xsl:param name="article"/>
    <xsl:param name="n"/>
    <xsl:variable name="para" select="article/preceding::para[$n]"/>
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="matches($para, $myregex)">
        <xsl:analyze-string select="." regex="{$myregex}">
          <xsl:matching-substring>
            <match>
              <xsl:value-of select="."/>
            </match>
          </xsl:matching-substring>
<!-- no need to non matching-substring case -->
        </xsl:analyze-string>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:call-template name="get-section-reference">
          <xsl:with-param name="article" select="."/>
          <xsl:with-param name="n" select="$n+1"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>
<!--
-->
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <output>
      <xsl:for-each select="//table">
        <xsl:call-template name="get-section-reference">
          <xsl:with-param name="article" select="."/>
          <xsl:with-param name="n" select="1"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </output>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>


-- 
Mathieu