here's the xml
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Budget>
  <Dollars Jan_2007="10000" Feb_2007="11000" Mar_2007="12000">
    <Store>11111</Store>
  </Dollars>
  <Salaried Jan_2007="3" Feb_2007="3" Mar_2007="2">
    <Store>11111</Store>
  </Salaried>
  <Hourly Jan_2007="10" Feb_2007="12" Mar_2007="11">
    <Store>11111</Store>
  </Hourly>
</Budget>


for simplicty's sake desired output
Jan_2007 10000 3 10
etc...

here's the pertintent xsl i have

<xsl:for-each select="Budget/Dollars/@*">
         <p><xsl:value-of select="name()"/></p>
         <p><xsl:value-of select="."/></p>
         <p><xsl:value-of select='../../Hourly/@*[position()]' /></p>
         <p><xsl:value-of select="position()" /></p>
         <p><xsl:value-of select="../../Hourly/@*[4]" /></p>
</xsl:for-each>

the last two lines i put in for test purposes.

the next to last line outputs 1,2,3,4 etc... like i would expect

the last line where the position is hard coded return the attribute
value for that position one again like i would expect

the third line isn't giving me what i would expect. If position() is return the appropriate number as demonstated by line 4 and you can return the appropriate values based on position as demonstrated by line 5. THEN WHY DOESN'T LINE THREE WORK? I'm no expert at xslt as the above demonstrates but i've been banging my head on this one for over a day now and i just can't see why this shouldn't work. ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!

You've forgotten that the value of position() changes inside a predicate. x[position()] means x[position()=position()] which selects everything.

You can't reliably select attributes by position anyway. Just because Jan2007 is attribute 1 of Dollars doesn't mean it will be attribute 1 of Hourly. Attribute order is intrinsically unpredictable. You need to select the attribute with the corresponding name, i.e.

<p><xsl:value-of select='../../Hourly/@*[name()=name(current())]' /></p>

And there's still no guarantee that Jan will precede Feb in your output.

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

thanks for the info. the xml is not created by me so it is what it is. However "they" have guaranteed me that the attributes will always be in the same order and length so position 1, 2, 3 etc... for the nodes dollars,salaried,hourly will always relate to the same period. I guess i'll see if that holds true.

thanks again for the help

It doesn't matter what order the attributes appear in the lexical XML. They won't necessarily be in that order by the time the XSLT stylesheet sees them. Many XML parsers use a hash table for attributes which doesn't retain order.

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

thanks for clarifying that. I'll look that up in the documentation for the parser i'm using. It appears to be working but that could be a fluke

If it works with your current parser, just be aware it could stop working when you move to a different one. A lot of people got caught by this when they moved applications from JDK 1.4 to 1.5, which has a different XML parser.

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