Re: [xsl] Re: quick [but difficult] Xpath Question

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Juan,

Try (//XX)[1]

And hope that your processor is optimized to stop after it gets the first 
one rather than traversing the entire tree.

NB, this is not the same as //XX[1], which translates as

/descendant-or-self::node()/child::XX[1]

where the predicate operates only on the second step (the child step), so 
you get all XX elements that are the first XX child of their parents -- not 
what you want.

Grouping it as

(/descendant-or-self::node()/child::XX)[1]

(or using the abbreviated form as above), solves that particular problem.

If you have namespace-qualified elements around and you want any namespace 
but local-name 'XX' you'll have to do

(//*[local-name()='XX'])[1]

Good luck,
Wendell


At 04:17 PM 8/23/2002, you wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I need an XPath statement which will return the first node found in the
> document, where the element's local-name() = 'XX'. The node can be anywhere
> in the source tree. I've tried all sorts of different statements but they
> either result too many records [ I just need the fist "hit"] or no records
> at all.
>
> I only need the first node, not all the nodes. and the name of the element
> is only known at runtime. This Xpath will be inside an XSLT file which acts
> as a "find command", displaying the first node found in the document.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


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