Re: AW: simple conditional looping

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Subject: Re: AW: simple conditional looping
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 11:26:20 -0400

At 07:19 AM 8/16/2004, David wrote:

> maybe a silly question, but why exactly do you need the ()? something
> like //* with a predicate [] should be enough or not?
A predicate in an axis step just filters that step.

//*[position() < 50]

is /descendent-or-self::node/child::*[position() < 50]
so it gives you all element nodes in the document that have fewer than
49 older siblings.
On the other hand

(//*)[position() < 50]

is (/descendent-or-self::node/child::*)[position() < 50]

which gives you the first 49 element nodes in the document.

Another (simple) way to do it is

/descendant::*[position() < 50]

...which may be less confusing for those not schooled in the arcana of XPath short syntax (but who use it anyway).

Note these are solutions to "iterating X times", but often in XSLT you only need to do this because you want to group a given set of nodes into batches of X, in which case the "Piez method" (iterating over an arbitrary set of nodes that happens to be large enough) is not only sneaky (and maybe ugly), it's gratuitous.

Cheers,
Wendell

======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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Current Thread
AW: simple conditional looping christof.hoeke - 16 Aug 2004 09:22:29 -0000 <Possible follow-ups> christof.hoeke - 16 Aug 2004 11:13:42 -0000 David Carlisle - 16 Aug 2004 11:25:28 -0000 Wendell Piez - 16 Aug 2004 15:58:02 -0000 <= Keyur K - 16 Aug 2004 13:04:40 -0000 David Carlisle - 16 Aug 2004 13:16:11 -0000 Wendell Piez - 16 Aug 2004 15:58:19 -0000 xptm - 16 Aug 2004 16:23:29 -0000

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