[xsl] Re: Efficient dictionary lookup

[Martin Holmes <mholmes@xxxxxxx>]

On 12-03-22 02:44 PM, David Carlisle wrote:
> On 22/03/2012 21:39, Martin Holmes wrote:
>  > HI all,
>  >
>  > As part of a small pilot project, I'm implementing a set of spelling
>  > normalization rules applied through XSLT 2.0 using Saxon 9. One
>  > operation that happens extremely frequently is a dictionary lookup;
[SNIP]

> sounds like you want to use a key then the processor will almost
> certainly create an efficient lookup index.
>
> If your dictionary is in a file say dict.xml
> <words>
> <word>one</word>
> <word>hello</word>
> </words>
>
> then
>
> <xsl:key name="w" match="word" use="."/>
>
> declares the index and
>
> key('w',$word,doc('dict.xml'))
>
> will return the word if it is in the dictionary.

That is much faster, indeed. It's still not fast -- the spellcheck 
dictionary is big -- but it's interesting to see that processing it as 
an XML structure with <xsl:key> is so much faster than processing it as 
a string.

Cheers,
Martin