Yeah.  This neatly sums up the problems I've been having.  An XPath expression
always seems to return an entire sub-tree, and it seems to me that I just want
a single node in this case.  Will xsl-copy give me that?

Peter

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Geert Josten [mailto:Geert.Josten@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent:	08 November 2004 14:42
To:	xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:	Re:  Conditional extraction of data

M. David Peterson wrote:

> ooops!
>
> This portion:
>
> <xsl:value-of select="foo"/> will output: "this is the value of foo"
>
> <xsl:value-of select="foo"/> will output a copy of all the text elements
> as well as the elements and there values that are descendants of foo. o
>
> should have read...
>
> <xsl:value-of select="foo"/> will output: "this is the value of foo"

Not true. xsl:value-of takes the first element from the node-set that results
from the expression
"foo" and converts that to a string. As both sub elements <bar> and <p> are
_inside_ element <foo>,
their textual content is returned as well.

The output is therefore: "
    this is the value of foo
    this is the value of bar.this is the value of a paragraph that is the
child of bar
"

(including new-lines when white-space is preserved)

> <xsl:copy-of select="foo"/> will output a copy of all the text elements
> as well as the elements and there values that are descendants of foo.
>
> Sorry for the confusion!
>
> <M:D/>

Grtz,
Geert