CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xsltxpath
Dieudonné
Dieudonné

Reputation: 561

Select nodes with XPath defined in attribute

I would like to select nodes using the XPath which is defined in an attribute in the same XML document. An example XML file:

<section count-node="table/row">
    <table>
        <row>row1</row>
        <row>row2</row>
        <row>row3</row>
    </table>
</section>

Now I would like to use XSLT to get the number of rows, e.g.

<xsl:template match="section">
    <xsl:variable name="count" select="count({MY VALUE FOR @count-node}})"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="$count"/>
</xsl:template>

where 

count({MY VALUE FOR @count-node}})

should be replaced by 

count(/table/row)

when processing the stylesheet. This should of course return 

3

I cannot use '/table/row' in the stylesheet as I do not know the content of the element. It does not have to be a table, or the table maybe nested.

How can I do this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 260

Answers (1)

Mads Hansen
Mads Hansen

Reputation: 66714

If your XPath expressions are rather simple, then the following might work:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:template match="section">
        <xsl:variable name="expression" select="@count-node" as="node()"/>   
        <xsl:value-of select="count( 
            descendant::*[$expression = 
                          string-join(
                            (ancestor::*[.=$expression/../descendant::*]/name(), 
                             name()),
                            '/')] )"/>
     </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

It counts all of the descendant elements who's computed XPath (relative from the section) is equal to the XPath from the @count-node.

Upvotes: 2

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