Re: [xsl] When to use text()

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Subject: Re: When to use text()
From: David Sewell <dsewell@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 11:15:28 -0400 (EDT)

I wonder how much of the problem (and there is one, at least for beginning users of XPath/XQuery/XSLT, and it even bites old hands sometimes) is owing to the fact that the XPath syntax for an axis step followed by a node type is identical to the syntax for an axis step followed by a single-argument function.

$node/text()

looks just like

$node/string()

even though the underlying semantics are quite different. I suspect that mentally one tends to conflate the two. (Applying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to programming languages, i.e. the way a language encodes things influences the way we think about them.)

David

On Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Ihe Onwuka wrote:

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

To gloss Mike ...

Yes, text() is over-used and commonly misused.

I wouldn't be blaming the programmers for that.
When you step back, it is clear from all the explanations given, that
the thing doesn't do what it says on the tin.


--
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400314, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4314 USA
Email: dsewell@xxxxxxxxxxxx   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/

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