Re: [xsl] Understanding XPath contains function

["Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/30/06, Ferdinand Soethe <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm confused by the difference in results when running the following
> xpath expressions against the same document:
>
> /common/Oberbereich[6][.//@Kursart='Bildungsurlaub']
>
> will give me Oberbereich[6] as a result as expected (because it has
> child elements that have a Kursart-Attribute of that value.
>
> While
> /common/Oberbereich[6][contains(.//@Kursart,'Bildungsurlaub')]
> will not give me any results where it should at least give me the same
> or more results that the previous expression, should it not?


In the second case the first argument to the function
 contains()
is a node-set.

In XPath 1.0 when a function expects a single argument and a node-set
of two or more nodes is passed, (only) the first node is taken as the
argument.

In your concrete case the first node passed is
   (.//@Kursart)[1]

and it happens so, that it doesn't contain the string
 'Bildungsurlaub'

Therefore, the reference to the contains() function returns false()
and the XPath expression
  /common/Oberbereich[6][contains(.//@Kursart,'Bildungsurlaub')]

does not select any node.

Hope this helped.

--
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
---------------------------------------
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.