Re: [xsl] preceding-sibling inside for-each appears to fail

[Francis Norton <francis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ted,

Ted Stresen-Reuter wrote:
...

>             <p>preceding sibling = <xsl:value-of 
> select="preceding-sibling::attribute/@name" /></p> 

...

> As you can see, following-sibling successfully returns the following 
> sibling, but preceding-sibling always returns the first node rather 
> than the preceding-sibling node.

You need to remember two things here. First, XPath expressions normally 
return node-sets. Second, node-sets are processed in document order. So 
your select expression is returning the first member of the set 
"preceding-sibling::attribute/@name", which is always the first in 
document order. But if you put a positional predicate in as part of an 
XPath step then that is applied in the order of the current axis, so try

     <p>preceding sibling = <xsl:value-of 
select="preceding-sibling::attribute[1]/@name" /></p>

Hope this helps -

Francis.


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