hello,

i'm running .net 2.0 on winxp, and am simply trying to set a variable (using an xpath query) in an xsl sheet to the name of the previous 'month' node in an xml nodeset given a month variable (ex.: "February"). the nodeset looks like the following:

<months>
  <month name="January"></month>
  <month name="February"></month>
  <month name="March"></month>
  <month name="April"></month>

  ...[etc]

</months>

so the desired result, passing in "February" for the variable, would be "January."

i think i need to use "preceding-sibling", but i'm not exactly sure how. i've searched a fair bit on this but can't quite seem to get the syntax right. it seems that the base query to get to the given node would be something like "months/month[@name=$month]", but from there i'm fairly lost.

can anyone help?

thanks so much in advance.

jeff

You're almost there. Just remember that a path is a sequence of steps:

months/month[@name=$month]/preceding-sibling::month[1]

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

michael, you rock! thanks so much for your reply.

jeff