Re: [xsl] Getting a distinct list of node names

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

At 03:15 PM 12/16/2003, you wrote:
> > > > node:definition/*[not(name() = name(preceding-sibling::*))]
> > >
> > >Why should this take a long time?  Isn't this the same as
> > >
> > >*[not(name() = name(preceding-sibling::*[last()]))]
> >
> > preceding-sibling::*[last()]), which therefore won't de-duplicate properly.
> >
> > So it won't take a long time, and it won't work either.
>
> But is there a way to express it as a single predicate? I mean, not equal 
> to the name
> of any preceding-sibling? Just out of curiousity.

I don't believe so, in XPath 1.0, since we have to test one value (the name 
of the context node) against many values (the names of the other nodes in 
the set) ... and while the equality rule for node sets allows us to do such 
a test, there's no way to get the set of names we want into a node set for 
testing.

This can presumably, however, be done in XPath 2.0, since it can create 
sequences on the fly.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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