Hello,

I am starting to doubt in power of xslt, not! :)

My problem is to build a searching engine.
So I have a string like in google: word1 "wo rd2" word3
I was writing a simple java method called search to parse this string into:
contains(.,'word1') or contains(.'wo rd2') or contains(.,'word3')
(I have seen strong difficulties in xslt, and that's why I decided use java)
But when I apply like this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:myExt="java:JavaClass" >

<xsl:param name="input">word1 "wo rd2" word3</xsl:param>
<xsl:variable name="search"><xsl:value-of select="myExt:search($input)"/></xsl:variable>

...

<xsl:when test="$search"> //this seems to be wrong, but in my opinion should work!
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:if test="@id">
<xsl:attribute name="id"><xsl:value-of select="substring-before(@id,'pl')"/></xsl:attribute>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:copy-of select="*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:when>

I receive the source document, even that I know that it doesn't contain any of word1, wo rd2 and word3.

Of course
<xsl:value-of select="$search"/> returns my string, that is: "contains(., 'word1') or ..."

So please tell what is wrong with this test attribute?

thanks
Bart

You seem to want to put an XPath expression into a variable and evaluate that XPath expression dynamically. That is not possible, unless you use an extension function.
Saxon 9 provides http://www.saxonica.com/documentatio.../evaluate.html although you might want to explain in some detail what you want to achieve to allow us judge whether you really need to use that approach or whether we can find a pure XSLT/XPath 2.0 solution.

Your Java method returns a string, there is no way the XSLT processor can know that this string should be treated as an XPath expression and evaluated as such. You can do that if your processor offers an xx:evaluate() extension function (Saxon does, for example) - but you need to call it explicitly.

However, it's really not difficult to solve this problem in XSLT 2.0. Something like this (not tested):

<xsl:function name="f:matches-one-of" as="xs:boolean">
  <xsl:param name="input" as="xs:string"/>
  <xsl:param name="search" as="xs:string"/>
  <xsl:variable name="results" as="xs:boolean*">
    <xsl:analyze-string select="$search" regex='(\S*)|("[^"]*?)'>
      <xsl:matching-substring>
        <xsl:sequence select='contains($input, regex-group(1))
           or contains($input, translate(regex-group(2), """", ""))'/>
      </xsl:matching-substring>
    </xsl:analyze-string>
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:sequence select="some $x in $results satisfies $x=true()"/>
</xsl:function>

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

I have spent last week reading your books about xslt and xpath 2.0.
Analyze-string, sequence and the other are powerful instruction. So I don't need to implement an extension functions and can stay by pure xslt.

Really appreciate, mission completed, that is all for now :)