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Re: [xsl] XPath 1.0 issue


Subject: Re: [xsl] XPath 1.0 issue
From: Jack Matheson <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 15:32:42 -0600

Thanks again!

'(' and ')' appear as separate terminals in the grammar, therefore a space
is allowed between them. (They are listed separately in this production
rule, and also in the list of ExprToken symbols in rule [28].) If the
grammar had been written as '()' (compare production [5] which uses '::',
and production [12] which uses '..') then no space would be permitted.

It's the fact that VariableReference ('$' QName) is an ExprToken that
ensures no space is allowed after the '$'. The rule is "Whitespace may be
freely added before or after any ExprToken", and by implication, not within
an ExprToken; the definition of ExprToken is in the following section.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/




-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Matheson [mailto:jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 15 February 2005 13:55
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] XPath 1.0 issue


Xalan and Saxon both allow an arbitrary number of space characters between the parenthesis in a node test, and I was
wondering if this is technically legal in XPath 1.0.


An example would be:
<xsl:apply-templates select="node(      )"/>

The XPath TR specifically states that whitespace can exist between tokens, but I'm not exactly sure how "token" is defined after reading the recent thread concerning "$ varname".

A node test in the XPath TR is defined as:

[7] NodeTest ::= NameTest
| NodeType '(' ')'
| 'processing-instruction' '(' Literal ')'


Can anyone explain this to me?


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