[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Keys with duplicates should be simple
Ihe, >> http://www.biglist.com/lists/lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/archives/201211/msg00170.html Indeed. You are not the only one to find 'except' to be contrary to what you expect, in view of its natural-language usage in English. (D*mned prepositions.) When reading XPath, my brain more or less automatically assumes everything is a relative path from the context node (that is, it traverses the tree relatively until an absolute path is given), so I mentally translate ($a except $b) as "my $a except my $b". So "my $a except my 'blah' element children" ($a except blah) doesn't freak me out. In English, "breakfast except donuts" should indicate (as you remind us in that thread) "breakfast except (its) donuts", while I read it as "(my) breakfast except (my) donuts". Or XPath "$breakfast except child::donut". (It turns out that being mentally able to translate abbreviated XPath into long XPath is also a useful skill.) Or, you can take "except" in its sense not as a preposition but a transitive verb, such as "he excepted himself on the grounds that he had already said too much". Cheers, Wendell -- Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com XML | XSLT | electronic publishing Eat Your Vegetables _____oo_________o_o___ooooo____ooooooo_^
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