RE: [xsl] Shorthand for XPath expression

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

William,

At 07:55 PM 7/18/01, Chris wrote:
>William,
>No. But you can do test=contains('bob-joe-ben', @name)

And if you want to be super-careful about it, you can amend this to:

test="contains(('bob-joe-ben', @name) and not(contains(@name, '-'))"

Of course this won't work if any of your names contains your delimiter (so 
use a different one).

You can't quite do

> ><xsl:if test="@name in ('bob', 'joe', 'ben')">

because XSL (XPath) has no notion of sets, exactly. Although it does have 
node sets. Which leads to the technique of keeping your list in an XML 
fragment (in the stylesheet or elsewhere) and then getting it as a node 
set. So you could do

<local:names>
   <name>bob</name>
   <name>joe</name>
   <name>ben</name>
</local:names>

at the top level of your stylesheet (don't forget to declare the "local" 
namespace). Then bind this node set to a variable, as in

<xsl:variable name="names" select="document('')/*/local:names/name"/>

and then you can do

test="@name=$names"

which will test true if any of the nodes in $names has string-value equal 
to @name. (Do we have a name for this idiom, anyone?)

This is good when things get hairy; use Chris's technique when things are 
light.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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