Hi,

Could anybody explain the difference between name(*) and name() functions in xsl. Thanks in advance for your response.

* means 'all children' and hence name(*) will return the name of the first child element.

name() returns the name of the current node.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

> * means 'all children' and hence name(*) will return the name of the first child element.

That's true in 1.0. In 2.0, name(*) will give an error if there is more than one child. If you want the name of the first child, you should say so: name(*[1]).

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

Hi Sam & Michael,

Thanks a lot to both of you for the response.