hi all,
      here is xslt which is always giving me the count value as 0. This is extracted from the sams reply to my earlier numbering problem (thank you Sam :-). I have changed little bit according to my purpose.

<xsl:template match="mml:mo[.='(']">
   <xsl:choose>
       <xsl:when test="text() = '('">
    <xsl:variable name="moWithParen" select="count(preceding::mo[text() = '('])"/>
     <prompt><goto next = "{$moWithParen}"/></prompt>

     <prompt></form></prompt>

   (Also please note here that I want </form> within the prompts. and at this point it is giving me error that there is no matching <form> found. I should be able to output the above line without any error)

         <prompt><form name = "{$moWithParen}"></prompt>

    (A similar kind of error found here.. The error says I should have the form closed but my requirement is that i shouldnt and should output as it is shown in above line)

    </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise/>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

kindly help is needed
 Thank you
 gs

The errors are showing up because you are attempting to output something that is not well-formed.

Is it really a requirement that the "form" start tag and end tag appear within prompt elements separately?

I will slightly modify a reply from Mr. Kay (by only changing "tr" to "form") from the October 2001 archives "HTML Forced Output" dealing with a similar situation:

"A stylesheet transforms an input tree to an output tree, and then serializes the result as XML or HTML. Clearly the tree can't contain half a node.

You can cheat by using
 <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;/form&gt;</xsl:text>

but you need to be aware that you are not using the language the way it was intended to be used, and that this will limit the options on deploying the stylesheet. I'd prefer to look back at your design, and correct it at source. There must be a better way of doing this."

Good luck,

...sam

And if your match is:
There is little point in then testing if the text equals "(":
as this is always true.

Joe (MVP - xml)