Re: [xsl] Selecting unparsed text from inside a tag

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I said I sometimes use xsl:sequence (instead of value-of, copy-of,
> apply-templates) and wondered if there might be side effects to using
> xsl:sequence for this purpose that I may not know about.... 

If you are going to the result tree then xsl:sequence and xsl:copy-of
are the same thing for that use, but if it is the result of a template
or function being save in a varuiable then they are different, using
copy-of you get new (parentless) nodes that are copies of the original
nodes, using xsl:sequence references the original nodes in the document.
This can make a lot of difference, which you need depends on what you
want to do.

So if the input is
<x><a/><b/><c/></x>
and you do

<xsl:variable name="v1" as="node()*">
  <xsl:copy-of select="x/node()"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="v2" as="node()*">
  <xsl:sequence select="x/node()"/>
</xsl:variable>

Then if you copy either $v1 or $v2 to the result tree you get
<a/><b/><c/>

but for example
$v1[1]/following-sibling::* is <b/><c/> as they are the following
siblings of <a/> in the original document but

$v2[1]/following-sibling::* is the empty sequence as $v2 consists of
three new nodes <a/>, <b/>, <c/> with no common parent and unconnected
by the sibling axis.


It would be hard to guess that you meant the content of p in 

<p>Some text and <br/> some more <b>text</b>.</p>


from the subject line as it is parsed and it is not the content of a
tag. An XML parser parses the entire source document before XSLt sees
any of the input, and there are 5 tags in the above with contents
p, br, b, b and p. Element content is marked up _between_ two tags, it
isn't the content of either of them.

David

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