RE: [xsl] Number of characters in document

["Corey Haines" <chaines@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

You might be able to write a template that would use the (where is my copy
of Michael Kay's book when I need it) functions that let you get the node
name (nodename()?) and the namespace, use the string length function on it.
Add these together with the appropriate additions for the greater-than and
less-than signs, and you could get an approximate value.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Mike Brown
> Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2000 1:03 PM
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [xsl] Number of characters in document
>
>
> David_N_Bertoni@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > On 17-12-2000, Evyatar_Kafkafi wrote:
> > >Question: How do I (inside the XSL stylesheet) get the number of
> > characters in the whole XML document (or in a specific node)?
> > >
>
> Every type of node has a string-value. See the XPath spec where it
> describes each type of node. You can obtain the length of that value
> with the string-value() function, also described in the XPath spec.
>
> > >for example, if the XML document is:
> > ><A>
> > >          <B>
> > >                    <C>1</C>
> > >          </B>
> > >          <B>
> > >                    <C>1</C>
> > >                    <C>2</C>
> > >          </B>
> > ></A>
> > >
> > >the number of characters in node A would be the length of the string
> > >"<A><B><C>1</C></B><B><C>1</C><C>2</C></B></A>"
> >
> > You can't.  XSLT sees the parsed representation of the XML document, not
> > the tagged text, so the '<', '</', '</' and '/>' markup isn't present.
>
> To expand on what David said, the markup is not part of the node. The node
> is a logical structure that is implied by the markup. <C>3</C> implies the
> logical structure 'an element node named C, that is the parent of a text
> node containing the 3 character'. There's no way to count the number of
> markup characters that were used to produce that logical structure. You
> can count the number of characters in the text node if you wanted (there's
> just 1 in this example).
>
> But where there's a will, there's a way. *If* you know the name of
> the file and you don't mind hard-coding it in your stylesheet, you can
> make the file be a general entity which you can refer to in a variable
> assignment, and then you take the string-length() of the variable.
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [ <!ENTITY xmlfile SYSTEM "file.xml"> ]>
> <xsl:stylesheet ...>
> ...
>     <xsl:variable name="xmlFileAsTextNode">&xmlfile;</xsl:variable>
>     <xsl:text>The file's length (in characters) is </xsl:text>
>     <xsl:value-of select="string-length($xmlFileAsTextNode)"/>
> ...
>
> Not exactly general-purpose though.
>
>    - Mike
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Mike J. Brown, software engineer at            My XML/XSL resources:
> webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA              http://skew.org/xml/
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
>


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