My XML-data has the follwing structure:

<Rubric>Some text
     <Reference>A1</Reference>
     . More text
     <Reference>B1</Reference>
     <Reference>B2</Reference>
     . This is the last text.
</Rubric>

From this I want to generate text, where the two adjacent references are
combined in brackets and separated by a coma.

This is the output I would like to get:

      Some text (A1). More text (B1, B2). This is the last text.

I tried to make use of the name of the preceding-sibling and the following-sibling, but it does not work. This is one of the variants I tried:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text" version="1.0"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="Reference">
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="preceding-sibling[name()=Reference]">
                <xsl:text> ,</xsl:text>
                <xsl:value-of select="."/>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:text> (</xsl:text>
                <xsl:value-of select="."/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
        <xsl:if test="following-sibling[name()!=Reference]">
            <xsl:text>)</xsl:text>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>


This is the generated output:
 Some text
      (A1
     . More text
      (B1 (B2
     . This is the last text.

This is one of the variants I tried:

following-sibling[name()!=Reference]

It looks to me as if you're trying to learn the language by trial and error. Guesswork will never get you there.

An axis-name in XPath is always followed by "::" and a NodeTest. "following-sibling" without "::" is interpreted as an element name, so this test is looking for all child elements named following-sibling whose name is the same as the content of the grandchild element named Reference. In other words, your guess is a pretty wild one.

You want test="following-sibling::*[1][self::Reference]"

That is:

- select all the following sibling elements (following-sibling::*)
- choose the first one ([1])
- select this element if its name is Reference ([self::Reference])
- return true if the resulting node-set is non-empty



Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Thank you for your help Michael.

Your hint soved my problem. I definitely have to investigate more time on getting accustomed to XPath.

Thanks again Susanne :)