[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date]

Re: [xsl] xsl:sort/@case-order feature missed

---

---

I only have the first edition of the XSLT programmer's reference,
so maybe this has changed, but mine says for the meaning
of case-order :
"Defines whether upper-case letters are to be collated before
or after lower-case letters. The default is language-dependant."

The language that is referred to here can only be the one that
is specified by xsl:sort's lang attribute, given that it seems
hard to define what happens when sorting elements that
bear different xml:lang attributes.

So if you don't specify case-order, you should get either the
upper-first or the lower-first behavior, depending on the
lang attribute. I think that's what "case-order effective value"
means. There does not seem to be a way to sort in
document-order strings that only differ in case.

In fact, to achieve what you want, the processor would have
to compare strings in a case-insensitive way, which is
somewhat different from deciding whether uppercase
comes before or after lowercase. I'm not sure this behavior
should be considered a variant of case-order.

If there was an uppercase() function (is there one in XSLT 2 ?)
this would get you the desired order :

<xsl:sort select="uppercase(...)" />

In short, getting rid of the case-order attribute will not be
useful. You'll get the default case-order for your
processing environment's default language.

Cheers,
--Jonathan

PS: I don't quite understand your point 2.
Do you mean that my previous suggestion would not work in
your application ? Notice that I carefully did not write such
thing as :
 <xsl:choose>
 <xsl:when test="...">
 <xsl:sort ...>
 </xsl:when>
Perhaps if we could see more of the templates in question
it would be easier to help.
In any case, the point is moot if as I surmise above, the
absence of case-order does not give your intended result.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nestel, Frank ISC 6" <nestefan@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 2:51 PM
Subject: AW: [xsl] xsl:sort/@case-order feature missed


> 
> Thanks Jonathan for your reply.
> 
> I'm not sure if I understand your suggestions. Well, maybe
> I understand but didn't like what you meant :-)
> 
> 1. When it comes to our application, I could use something
> like "sort, but use document order as tiebreak" instead of
> specifying a case order explicitely or implicitely (by
> some default). If this order does not exist, I could use
> it. Maybe we have to create an extra sort attribute or so.
> But this is ugly. As I understand Michael Kay in his book,
> he claimes that case order depends on the actual publication,
> not only on language. What depends on language is the way
> the letters themselves are collated (he gives an example
> about the rules for German/Swedish &auml; ) In my eyes the
> XSLT standard of w3c is not entirely explicit in this respect.
> But this might be my lacking sense of fine grained English.
> In XSLT 2 it all depends how to read "case-order effective value"
> in the situation where no case-order is present. I didn't understand 
> yet the new collation attribute in XSLT 2 and whether this could 
> provide a solution to my problem:
> 
> 2. Of course one could keep two sort statements. The problem 
> I had only arrose, cause we had a stack of named templates 
> which were all them same, but differed in that little case-ordering, 
> so duplication does not only involve duplication of two simple 
> xsl:sort elements but restructuring and duplication of some part 
> of a template call hierarchy. We just wanted to avoid that sheer 
> uglyness. Unfortunately there is no way of doing s.th. like
> <xsl:choose>
> <xsl:when test="...">
> <xsl:sort ...>
> </xsl:when>
> ...
> </xsl:choose>
> Such a control probably hurt the possibilty to avoid some
> runtime work by smart preprocessing of the stylesheet on
> first translation.
> 



 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list

---