Re: [xsl] XPath for matching multiple child elements

["Will McCutchen" <mccutchen@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/28/06, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yes, but it might have fairly horrible performance.
>
> I don't know how other processors work, but with Saxon, patterns are a lot
> more efficient if they identify the element names that match, because Saxon
> basically does a hash lookup on the node kind and then on the node name. Any
> match="*" pattern gets tested against every node; and in this case that will
> involve a serial search through the list of h1|p|b|i elements, which is
> distinctly O(n^2). Not worth the savings in keystrokes.

Yeah, I started to use Wendell's suggestion, but I decided for myself
that having the template matching pattern spelled out explicitly
(<xsl:template match="comments//h1 | comments//p ...">) would be
better for my (and others') long-term comprehension of the style
sheet.  I'm glad to see that I probably made a good choice
performance-wise, too.

Thanks,


Will.