Re: Selecting only the first node that matches.

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Subject: Re: Selecting only the first node that matches.
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 21:06:45 -0500

At 2002-11-04 17:50 -0800, Shawn O. McKenzie wrote:

If possible, I need to be able to select only the first instance of a match.

Not sure what you mean here by "of a match", so I've made some assumptions below.

Consider the following:

<ancestor name="1">
   <propertyref name="foo"/>
   <ancestor name="2">
       <propertyref name="bar"/>
       <ancestor name="3">
           <propertyref name="foo"/>
           <ancestor name="4">
                <propertyref name="fnord"/>

Are we to assume your current node is somewhere inside here, beneath ancestor "4" when you are doing your looking?

             </ancestor>
        </ancestor>
   </ancestor>
</ancestor>
I would like to be able to match on the first ancestor element that has a propertyref/@name of foo, but not the second one. These nested "ancestor" elements vary in depth and can have any number of propertyref attributes.

By "first" do you mean "first in document order" or "closest up the ancestry"?

If the latter, and your current node is a descendant of the deepest ancestor, then you can use:

select="ancestor::*[propertyref/@name='foo'][1]"

Perhaps your "foo" is in a variable, so you would use:

select="ancestor::*[propertyref/@name=$look][1]"

This selects from all ancestors of any name whose child element propertyref has a name attribute equal to the variable $look, the first one in reverse document order ... which would be the closes such ancestor.

I plan to solve this with recursion,

You may be jumping to a conclusion of needing recursion, when you may not if your needs are as simple as I've interpreted them to be. I've assumed that your processing is happening inside the nested ancestors and you are looking "up" the ancestry.

I hope this helps.

............. Ken


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Current Thread
Selecting only the first node that matches. Shawn O. McKenzie - Mon, 4 Nov 2002 20:49:17 -0500 (EST) G. Ken Holman - Mon, 4 Nov 2002 21:03:22 -0500 (EST) <=

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