That's the point Liam was making last week - XML is very text-oriented. When
you add a list of numbers to a document it gets serialized as a string. As
Martin says, you can turn it back into a sequence of numbers by validating
against a list type defined in a schema. But that's very limiting, which is
why XSLT 3.0 introduced maps and arrays.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

> On 19 Jul 2020, at 20:14, Dr. Roger L Costello costello@xxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> I created a sequence (1, 2, 3) as follows:
>
> <xsl:variable name="list" select="(1, 2, 3)" as="xs:integer*" />
>
> I checked that $list contains 3 integers:
>
> <xsl:message>count($list) = <xsl:value-of
select="count($list)"/></xsl:message>
>
> Sure enough, the output shows that there are 3 items:
>
> count($list) = 3
>
> Next, I want to store that sequence of integers in an element, along with
other elements:
>
> <xsl:variable name="document" as="element(Document)">
>    <Document>
>        <Greeting>My List</Greeting>
>        <List><xsl:sequence select="$list" /></List>
>        <Ending>The End</Ending>
>    </Document>
> </xsl:variable>
>
> Does the <List> element contain a sequence of 3 integers:
>
> <xsl:message>count($document/List) = <xsl:value-of
select="count($document/List)"/></xsl:message>
>
> Yikes! No it doesn't:
>
> count($document/List) = 1
>
> How to do what I want to do? That is, how to store the sequence of integers
in an element, along with other elements, such that I can pull the sequence
out of the element and immediately operate on the sequence? If that can't be
done, then what's the right way to do what I want to do?
>
> Here is my XSLT program:
>
> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
>    version="3.0">
>
>    <xsl:template match="/">
>        <xsl:variable name="list" select="(1, 2, 3)" as="xs:integer*" />
>        <xsl:message>count($list) = <xsl:value-of
select="count($list)"/></xsl:message>
>        <xsl:variable name="document" as="element(Document)">
>            <Document>
>                <Greeting>My List</Greeting>
>                <List><xsl:sequence select="$list" /></List>
>                <Ending>The End</Ending>
>            </Document>
>        </xsl:variable>
>        <xsl:message>count($document/List) = <xsl:value-of
select="count($document/List)"/></xsl:message>
>    </xsl:template>
> </xsl:stylesheet>
>
> /Roger