I would like to know how I can select multiple nodes based on a comma-separated list.

for instance
I have a tree part
<address>
 ....
 <phone>123</phone>
 <fax>12345</fax>
 <ext>02231</ext>
 <email>[email protected]</email>
</address>
and a list: mylist = "phone,ext"

When the active element is <email> I want to select all its sibling elements with the local-names based on the values in the list ("phone" and "ext")

what I want to select = ../*[local-name()='phone' or local-name()='ext'] based on a variable $mylist

In 2.0:

../*[name()=tokenize($contactlist, ',')]

There's no tokenize() in 1.0, though there are equivalent extensions in some products. The best thing is to preconvert "phone,ext" into <list><kw>phone</kw><kw>ext</kw></list> and then you can write

../*[name()=$list/kw]



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

Thanx i tried this also but it gave a syntax error
../*[matches(local-name(),replace($mylist,',','|')]

but this worked
../*[matches(local-name(),'phone|ext']
isn't replace evaluated first (replace($mylist,',','|') gives phone|ext)?

>Thanx i tried this also but it gave a syntax error ./*[matches(local-name(),replace($mylist,',','|')]

Every programmer needs to learn to count brackets.

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

shame on me