Re: [xsl] xsl:for or xsl:repeat

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Just a quick, somewhat stupid question that probably won't come up in
> any real practicality.  What if there is the need to iterate more than
> there are nodes in the document?

well for any fixed number you can ensure that the document you use for
the iteration (which doesn't have to be your source document) has
enough nodes: for example you can use the stylesheet
document('')//node()
and have as many nodes as you want in that (add 1000 empty comments at
the end if need be)
if you are picking up a number dynamically it's probably easier to just
give in and write the recursive template (which after all is only 4 or 5
lines of code) apart from anything else loading a massive document just
tp iterate overthe integers is a bit expensive.
But if you really want to use //node() then
z=document('')//node())
m=count($z)
a=floor($n div $m)
b=$n - $a*$m
for-each $z[position() <= $a]
  for-each $z
for-each $z[position() <= $b]

will do any number of iterations up to the square of the number of nodes
in the stylesheet which can be a pretty big number.
(I may have got the sums wrong but too late to think about that too
hard)

David

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