Hello,

Thanks for your help.

I'd like to count how many <entry> nodes are present, whose <language> nodes have the attribute lang='DE'. I made some tests with

<xsl:if test="header/language[@lang='DE']">
entries: <xsl:value-of select="count(header/language/entry" />
</xsl:if>

but I get a line for each node. I'd like to have just one line, like:

entries : 2

Here is the data:

<data>

<header>
<language lang='DE' />
<entry>entry</entry>
</header>

<header>
<language lang='DE' />
<entry>entry 2</entry>
</header>

</data>

It is not clear where the problem is.
Your code sample seems to lack the predicate [@lang='DE'] on the count expression e.g. you need

Hello,

Sorry for not being clear enough. I'm trying to count how many <entry> there are with the lang attribute of <language> set to 'DE'.

I already tried
<xsl:value-of select="count(header/language[@lang = 'DE']/entry)"/>

but I get 0 as a result, although there should be 2.

Thanks for your help

maybe there is a problem because

<language> and <entry> are on the same level ? I had a look at Xpath, but even with a ./ it's still the same

thanks

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Thank you Joe, you're the man! It worked.

Have a nice day

Should be

You've been given an answer, but I hope you have also understood where you were going wrong. It looks to me as if you were thinking along the lines "process all the records, and if the record matches my criteria, then count it." That's record-at-a-time thinking, and you've got to change your mindset to think in terms of processing sets of records a a time (or elements or nodes or whatever).

The count() function tells you how many items there are in a supplied set of items; so you need an expression that selects the set of items of interest, and then apply the count() function to the result. In your case the set of interest is a subset of all the entry nodes, specifically that subset for which language/@lang='DE'. You could translate this literally as

count(//entry[../language/@lang='DE'])

but if there's a one-to-one correpondence between entry elements and @lang attributes then you get the same answer with

count(//@lang[.='DE'])

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