[xsl] Re: Usage of Asterisk in XPath expressions

Subject: [xsl] Re: Usage of Asterisk in XPath expressions
From: "Philipp Nanz philipp.nanz@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2019 16:54:37 -0000
Hello folks,

that cleared it up for me, thank you very much! XPath 3.1 for the win :-)

Kind regards,

Philipp

Am 22.03.2019 um 12:00 schrieb Philipp Nanz:
Hello there,

due to a typo, we missed the colon between the namespace prefix and
the wildcard in a XPath expression. To my surpise, this causes static
errors in some version of Saxon and runs flawlessly in others,
although I would expect this to be static error.

Suppose this data:

<foo:bar xmlns:foo="http://test/ns/foo"; a="b">Yadda</foo:bar>

Then suppose this stylesheet:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
B B B  xmlns:foo="http://test/ns/foo";
B B B  version="2.0">

B B B  <xsl:template match="foo:bar">
B B B B B B B  <xsl:if test="ancestor-or-self::foo*[@a]">
B B B B B B B B B B B  <xsl:copy>
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B  <xsl:value-of select="."/>
B B B B B B B B B B B  </xsl:copy>
B B B B B B B  </xsl:if>
B B B  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

As you can see the colon is missing after the namespace prefix foo.
What baffles me is that different versions of Saxon exhibit different
behavious here, and especially newer versions don't seem to treat this
as a problem at all.

B * Saxon 9.6: Stops with something that looks like an internal error
B * Saxon 9.7: Says I need to enable XPath 3.1 to use this expression?!?
B * Saxon 9.8, 9.9: Don't run into an error at all

That makes me wonder: Is this an error at all? or is there some
wildcard feature or something in XPath 3.1 that I cam't find in the docs?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Kind regards,

Philipp

Current Thread