counting attribute lengths

snafu7x7 · October 11th, 2007, 09:58 AM

I'm sure there is an easy way to do this that I haven't stumbled upon yet. I have xml that at its most basic looks something like this:

<data>
<row><id>1234</id></row>
<row><id>5678</id></row>
<row><id>223344</id></row>
<row><id>557799</id></row>
<row><id>112244</id></row>
<row><id>888999000</id></row>
<row><id>111222333</id></row>
</data>

thanx in advance for any insight

Note how the length of the id node can be of 4, 6 or 9 characters. I'm trying to write a snippet of xsl that will allow me to assign the total counts for each length to 3 different variables, so that for this example I would have:

$4count = 2
$6count = 3
$9count = 2

joefawcett · October 11th, 2007, 10:12 AM

You need the string-length and count functions, there are quite a few ways of doing this though, here's one:

Code:

<xsl:variable name="id-4-count" select="count(/*/row/id[string-length(.) = 4])"/>

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

snafu7x7 · October 11th, 2007, 10:24 AM

Joe,

well I was at least close because I was playing around with both the count and the string-length functions, I just couldn't find a way to combine them that was working for me. Your solution works perfectly though, thank you for your help!

joefawcett · October 11th, 2007, 10:51 AM

The more sophisticated way would be to set up a key:

Code:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="text"/>
  <xsl:key name="id-by-length" match="id" use="string-length(.)"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:text>id length 4: </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="count(key('id-by-length', 4))"/>
    <xsl:text>#x0a;</xsl:text>
    <xsl:text>id length 6: </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="count(key('id-by-length', 6))"/>
    <xsl:text>#x0a;</xsl:text>
    <xsl:text>id length 8: </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="count(key('id-by-length', 8))"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

joefawcett · October 11th, 2007, 10:56 AM

The forum code has kindly stripped out the ampersands from my last post, each # should be preceded by an &.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

mhkay · October 11th, 2007, 11:29 AM

In suggesting the use of grouping, of course, I was assuming that you might have "attributes" of any length, not known in advance. If you know the only lengths will be 4, 6 and 8 then it's much easier.

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