Re: [xsl] calculating relative position in document order

Subject: Re: [xsl] calculating relative position in document order
From: tom s <tshmit@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:40:48 -0700 (PDT)
I'm running 2.0, so that is the perfect solution!

Thanks so much, Ken.  :-)



----- Original Message ----
From: G. Ken Holman <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 1:15:26 PM
Subject: Re: [xsl] calculating relative position in document order

XSLT 2.0 has the operators "<<" and ">>" returning true and false 
regarding the first operand being (respectively) before or after the 
second operand in document order.

Are you restricted to XSLT 1?

. . . . . . . . . Ken

At 2008-10-16 09:53 -0700, tom s wrote:
>I'd like to be able to determine which element is "closer", in terms 
>of document order, to a given element. eg, given two structures 
>containing siblings:
>
>         <a>
>         <b>
>         <c>
>and
>         <b>
>         <a>
>         <c>
>
>I'd like to detect that the second structure is "out of order". In 
>my fantasy pseudo code, I might express the constraint as:
>
>//c[positionEX(preceding::a[1]) > positionEX(preceding::b[1])]
>
>Where my fantasy positionEX() function returns the absolute position 
>of the argument in the document.
>
>Am I missing something, or is implementing this operation in real 
>xpath/xslt much more difficult than it seems it should be?


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