Syntax

David Carlisle

match="foo[@bar]" finds foo elements that have are children of the current node, and have a bar attribute

match="foo/@bar" finds bar attributes of foo children of the current node

if this is in an apply-templates, then the current node in the matching template will be the foo element in the first case but an _attribute node_ in the second.

match="foo/@bar" does not mean `children' it means `next step' and at each step you can change axis along which to travel, here you have @ which is short for attribute::, and no specified axis is short for child:: so the above is really

child::foo/attribute::bar

which means get bar attributes of foo children.

David Carlisle

Using value-of just gets you the character data, so if there is any xml markup in the content of the current element then that won't get output from that markup.

David Carlisle

  <xsl:when test="$counter<'1'">

'1' is the string 1, on which you can't do a less than test. You want the number 1, so use

  <xsl:when test="$counter < 1">

  > What I am trying to do is simply to test if the number of ELT is less
  > than 1

If that's all you want to do with the count, you don't need a variable at all:

    <xsl:when test="count(ELT) = 0">

since it's a count frrom a node list, it can't be negative, so = 0 seems a simpler test than < 1.

In fact that is just testing whether there are any ELT, for which you don't need count() as an empty node list counts as false,

    <xsl:when test="ELT">