I'm sorry, I can see that you're quoting an answer that I gave in response
to a message of yours, but I don't recall enough of the context to help you
further. Start again with a new question. The usual things: what's your
input, what's your desired output, how are you trying to solve the problem,
where are you getting stuck.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/ 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karen McAdams [mailto:kemcadams@xxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 03 May 2006 23:09
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re:  get the sum of a sequence of numbers
> 
>          > That does not seem to work in this situation.
> 
> Gives the wrong answer? Gives an error message? Catches fire? 
> It's a lot easier to diagnose problems when you know what the 
> symptoms are.
> ========
> I concatenates the values in the node and displays them as i 
> reported in the first email.
> 
> 
> > 
> >         <xsl:variable name="mbt" select="sum(for $n in
> > number($mb) return number($n))"/>
> 
> number($mb) is going to produce a single number as its 
> result. So this is the same as select="sum(number($mb))" 
> which is the same as select="number($mb)". I don't know what 
> $mb is, but if it's a sequence of strings that can be 
> converted to numbers then you want
> 
> >         <xsl:variable name="mbt" select="sum(for $n in $mb return
> number($n))"/>
> 
> that is, you want to convert the strings to numbers individually.
> 
> However, $mb isn't a sequence of strings, because you declared it as:
> 
>       <xsl:variable name="mb">
>            <xsl:apply-templates mode="mb"/>
>        </xsl:variable>  
> 
> which means $mb is actually a single document node; so the 
> "for" expression isn't going to do anything useful. I can't 
> tell how to correct this without knowing what's coming back 
> from the apply-templates.
> =====
> What's coming back is a document node that contains the word 
> count for each child element that contains a language attribute.
> 
> What i need cumulative count of the total words of the child 
> elements that contain a language attribute. 
> 
> The other solution that was recommended was to copy these 
> child elements into a document node and count the words in 
> this new document node.
> 
> Im just not sure what the best technique to use to utilize 
> the benefits of xslt 2.0 to accomplish this count-
> 
> Karen McAdams