Re: [xsl] Data extraction

["David Carlisle d.p.carlisle@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 at 19:31, Mailing Lists Mail daktapaal@xxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> David,
> Thanks for the reply. My apologies, i didn't give example of my XML. The XML
contains single occurance of ElementToExtract/ node. In which case I thought
that instead of going through the whole tree, jumping to the element using
descendant::*:ElementToExtract is firstly small in code and secondly
eleminating the useless node traversal ?
>
> Wanted to validate my thought ..
>
well still it may or may not be quicker, in particular if the element
is near the top of the tree the apply templates iteration will stop
quickly but the descendant::*:ElementToExtract in principle forces a
search of the whole document to find all the occurrences, as (assuming
no schema processing) xslt doesn't know there is only one. Of course
it might not need to search the document as the element names may have
been pre-indexed, but in ether case adding [1] to the end wouldn't
hurt and would make it stop after finding the element.

David