Agreed: we should answer the OP's question with an appropriate regex 
(which I think would just be " [a-zA-Z]\.", but I've not tested this in 
XPath, and leave the details to the experts).

NOT Agreed: this isn't about political correctness, it's about software 
design correctness. While not directly about XSL/XPath, many discussions 
veer appropriately into whether a design will meet the desired use case. 
And forcing a single character middle name -- as has been amply 
demonstrated in previous posts -- would not even work if your intended 
audience was upper-middle-class-American-white-males in your 200 home 
gated community.

These lists are communities of humans -- real people -- and it's 
entirely appropriate to point out a software design fail, as well as 
provide explicit XSL/XPath advice.

Just my $0.02,
--R. Lane Fozzard III, BS, MS, MS, LOSA, aka "Rich"

-- 
Richard Fozzard, Computer Scientist
   Geospatial Metadata: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/metadata/emma

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)
Univ. Colorado & NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
151 Patton Ave, Room 468, Asheville, NC 28801
Office: 828-271-4920 Cell: 303-579-5615, Email: richard.fozzard@xxxxxxxx



On 6/2/16 10:39 AM, Tommie Usdin btusdin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Friends b
>
> This is xls-list, not politically-correct-design-list. It is reasonable
> for a participant to ask for help with an XPath test here, and reasonable
> to give help with that test.  Discussion of whether this is a test that
> should be done for social reasons is out of scope for this list.
>
> If the question had been bhow to test that an element contains a letter
> followed by a period and nothing elseb the OP would have gotten the
> needed help without the politics. (While I am certain that Roger is
> more than hardy enough to take this off-topic criticism, there are other
> participants who would be chased off the list by the reception this
> question has received.)
>
> So, can we please return to the XPath part of the question and leave
> the business rules out of the discussion?
>
> Thank you.
>
> b Tommie
>
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