Re: select containing nested hard brackets?

> Has anyone used a select statement with nested hard brackets:
yes

but not 
   select="something/[somethingA[somethingB]]"
can't have [ after [ need

   select="something/*[somethingA[somethingB]]"

actually that is the same as

   select="something/*[somethingA/somethingB]"

in this case.

The former asks for all eleemnt children of something fro which the the
XPath
somethingA[somethingB] returns true (ie is non empty)
this is true if there is any somethingA for which the selection
somethingB is non empty.

That in turn is true just if somethingA/somethingB from the original
node will return a non empty node set, which leads to the second form I
give above.

To understand the nested [] forget you are inside any number of []
and just evaluate th eXpath expression as a boolean. Node set
expressions
will be coerced to boolean depending on whether the selected node set is
empty (false) or non empty (true)

so xsl:if test="a[b] and c[d[e]]"
is true if there's an a child that has a b child, and a c child that has
a d child that has an e child.

David


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