Re: Selecting case insensitively

Michal,

>I tried to get "insensitively" unique records from a list and I failed,
what am
>I missing?

Within your template, the XPath you're using to figure out whether the
state is unique or not is:

  Test/location/state[not(translate(.,$lowercase,$uppercase)=
                          translate(following::state,$lowercase,$uppercase))]

In other words: find any states where there isn't a following state that
has the same content as this one (case insensitively).  For the last state
in your list, this will always be true: there are no states that follow
that one, so it's true that there are no states that have the same content
(case insensitive or not!).

As you're working through the list in document order, what you're probably
after is 'preceding' rather than 'following'.  Then, each state will appear
if no state with that name has already appeared.

  Test/location/state[not(translate(.,$lowercase,$uppercase)=
                          translate(preceding::state,$lowercase,$uppercase))]

The other alternative is to use keys to identify unique states.  Index each
of the states according to the key:

<xsl:key name="states" match="state"
         use="translate(., $lowercase, $uppercase)" />

And then retrieve only the unique ones using:

  Test/location/state[generate-id() =
         generate-id(key('states', translate(., $lowercase, $uppercase))[1])]

In other words, is the unique identifier for this state the same as unique
identifier for the first state retrieved using the key.  This will work
more efficiently if you have lots and lots of states in your document (and
if your XSLT processor supports keys).

I hope that this helps,

Jeni



Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list