Re: in search for more elegant XPaths

I am thinking about a way to make some XPaths, that I'am using quite
often, more "elegant".
Please take for example:

<xsl:function name="ln:getCaseType">
	<xsl:param name="case" as="element()"/>
	<xsl:choose>
		<xsl:when test="starts-with($case, 'SG') or
starts-with($case, 'LSG') or starts-with($case, 'BSG')">

If you think that regular expressions are more readable then you could use
   <xsl:when test="matches($case, '^(SG|LSG|BSG)')">
It could even be compacted to
   <xsl:when test="matches($case, '^[LB]?SG')">

I very often testing for element nodes that have character content with
*[string-length(normalize-space(.))>0]

	Martin Honnen
	http://msmvps.com/blogs/martin_honnen/