RE: simple XPath question

> Now that I think about it some more, I believe in the
> previous chapter the
> author wrote that elements in node-sets do not have an order.

This often confuses people. Nodes have an order, called document order.
Node-sets have no ordering of their own, but the nodes themselves still have
an order.

Think of it as being like sets of integers. {1,2,3} and {3,1,2} represent
the same set of integers, because the set has no ordering. But it's still
possible to ask for the "second-highest integer in the set", because
integers are ordered. Similarly in a set of <country> nodes, you can ask for
the <country> that is second in document order.

>  Thus it could
> not be that select='item/country' could select the two
> <country> nodes,
> country[1] being US and country[2] being Canada.
>
> And the position() values are really a separate thing
> entirely.  They are
> positions in the source tree, not in the node-set, since
> nodes in node-sets don't have positions.

No, quite the contrary. position() has nothing to do with the position of a
node in the source tree, it's the position of the node in the current node
list that matters. For example, if you do xsl:for-each with an xsl:sort,
it's the position of the node in sorted order.

Mike Kay
Software AG


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