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Hi,
On 11/4/2011 9:27 PM, G. Ken Holman wrote: The current() function returns that node that was current at the beginning of the evaluation of the XPath expression. I'm sure Ken won't mind if I add a little color commentary. It may help to keep in mind that the "context node" is an XPath concept, while the "current node" is an XSLT concept. In XPath, the evaluation context for an expression provides inputs that may affect the results of evaluation; it includes a "context node" which is, for example, used as the starting point for a relative path. In a path with several steps, the context changes with each step. Similarly, predicates are evaluated relative to context(s) defined in the step they qualify. So two paths like "*[1]/*" and "*/*[1]" can return two different things: the positional predicate here is applied to different sets of nodes (evaluated in different contexts). (Indeed, to make sense of positional predicates it may help also to know that the XPath processor also keeps track of "context size" and "context position", i.e. whether a node selected is first of three, or whatever.) In XSLT, the *current node* is a node matched by a template rule or selected for processing by a for-each instruction. Among other things, the current node serves as the initial context node for any XPath in the template. So when you say "path/to/node", the context node is different in every step (actually any step may have many context nodes or none, depending on what came back from the previous step), while the current node is still the same as it is at the front (and is retrievable using the function current()). Cheers, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================
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