The conditional statement doesn't work.  However -- and this is what I 
    don't understand -- if I put in a valid value in place of the current 
    '{.}', it does work. 




[@id='{.}']

tests if the id attribute is equal to the string '{.}' which it isn't.
stuff inside string quotes is always a string literal in Xpath, and
that is the only place that {} is valid, as part of a string, {} never
has any special meaning in an Xpath expression.

If you wanted to test if the id attribute were equal to . you'd use

[@id=.]

except you don't want that as . there is the current node at that point,
ie the element that has the id attribute that you are testing.

probably you want

[@id=current()]

to test against the value of the node current at the outer expression.

David

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