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Re: [xsl] Inconsistency in descendant:: expressions?

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Peter West wrote:

I'm using Oxygen 15.0 with Saxon PE 9.5.0.2 XSLT 2.

My XSLT is rusty, and I was struggling with the expression of particular descendant expression. After a number of botched attempts, I cam up with two versions that seemed to work. (Yes, I will use the ancestor:: axis, but I want to know what is happening here.)

The following code operates on an xhtml document.

It would help if you posted a minimal but complete document allowing us to reproduce the problem.

1) <xsl:variable name="table-node" select="//*:table[//*:tr[count(*:td) = 3]][1]"/>

Are you sure that you want
//*:tr
inside of the predicate and not
.//*:tr
?
Your current versions looks at all *:tr elements in the document, not at the *:tr descendants of the *:table element you are applying the predicate to.

2) <xsl:variable name="table-ancestors" select="//*[descendant::node()=$table-node]"/>

You compare the string value of a table element to other nodes, is that what you want? The ". is $foo" which checks node identity you have below in 3) seems more meaningful to me.

3) <xsl:variable name="table-parents" select="//*[descendant::node()[. is $table-node]]"/>

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