>   <a>
>    <b attr="w1 w3 w6">...</b>
>    <b attr="w2 w12 w3 w7">...</b>
>    ... more <b>s here ...
>   </a>
> 
> when processing an <a> element, i need to calculate the 
> maximum number of whitespace-separated words for any 
> "b/@attr" attribute. so just what you see above, the value 
> would be 4, based on that second <b> child of <a>.
> 
> AFAICT, this will involve three steps:
> 
> 1) collect the "b/@attr" attributes (easy)
> 2) normalize space and word count each of those attribute values
>    (again, easy, stealing from kay, p. 527, the "word-count"
>    template :-)
> 3) finding the maximum of those values

You can count the words without recursive processing:

$x := normalize-space(@attr)
$y := translate(@attr, ' ', '')
$wc := string-length($x) - string-length($y) +1

> 
> since, as i understand it, you can't have a node-set of just 
> numbers, 

Since numbers aren't nodes, how could you have a node-set containing
numbers?

In XPath 2.0 of course you can have sequences of strings or numbers
which makes this kind of thing very much easier.

Michael Kay



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