> What I want to do is to count the number os characters in a  
> text node and all previous text nodes children of the current 
> text node's parent.


Well the XPath 2.0 solution is

sum(for $i in preceding-sibling::text() return string-length($i))

For XSLT 1.0 it's much more difficult, it's the classic problem of
summing a calculated value over a node-set. There are several workable
solutions:

- Construct a result tree fragment containing the computed values, then
use the sum() and xx:node-set() functions to do the summation.
- Use a recursive template
- Use Dimitre's FXSL library.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


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