RE: grabbing the path to a particular node

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

At 10:08 AM 8/8/00 +0100, Jeni wrote:
>It is actually possible to do this without recursion because the
>ancestor-or-self axis gives you a list of the nodes that are ancestors of
>the current node (or the current node itself).  You can *iterate* over this
>list instead:
>
><xsl:for-each select="ancestor-or-self::*">
>  <xsl:text>/</xsl:text>
>  <xsl:value-of select="name()" />
></xsl:for-each>

It works this way because xsl:for-each, by default, processes the selected
nodes in document order, which is down from the root, even though the axis
itself goes in reverse. This is pretty subtle.

You can change the order of its processing by using a sort. So (again,
without the recursion) to get them in reverse order, we could use

  <xsl:for-each select="ancestor-or-self::*">
    <xsl:sort select="count(ancestor::*)" order="descending"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="concat('/', name())"/>
  </xsl:for-each>

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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