Re: Counting Nodes

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At 00:46 26-11-2001, Richard Jinks wrote:
>More of an XPath question than an XSLT question, but it arose from an
>example transformation, so this seems like a good place to ask...

It is indeed.

>Is the following expression legal?
>count(//|//@*)

No.

>The reason I'm asking is that I'm currently evaluating a few different XSLT
>processers, with a view to using one of them in a product I'm working on.
>I've noticed that different processers handle it differently, the main
>stumbling block being the "//" by itself.

They should all stumble on it.  Have any accepted it?

>I've tried reading the XPath spec and the XSLT Programmers Reference (2nd
>Ed), but I can't arrive at a conclusive decision.
>They appear to imply that I can't use the // by itself, needing to follow it
>with a node set (i.e. //* (which won't help, btw, as it doesn't count the
>text nodes) ), but there are sections which suggest that I can use it as a
>node set (e.g. AbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath, p354 of above book).

The implications are right.  AbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath in the XPath 
spec is:

RelativeLocationPath '//' Step

and neither Step may not be the null string.  To count *all* of the nodes 
in a document, try count(/descendant-or-self::node() | //@*).  That will 
count the root node itself, and all text, element, PI, comment, and 
attribute nodes.  If you don't want to count the root node itself, try 
count(//node() | //@*).

HTH,
Chris
- -- 
Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, HMM Consulting Int'l, Inc.
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
<URL: http://www.hmmci.com/ > <URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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