Sorting

JohnBampton · March 12th, 2009, 09:55 AM

If I want to sort a list of countries by their name eg

<xsl:for-each select="countries/country">
<xsl:sort select="name"/>
<xsl:variable name="this" select="."></xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="next" select the next country in this sorted list</xsl:variable>

How can I get the next sorted item, i tried using following/following sibling but that only get the next country in the original xml document.

Martin Honnen · March 12th, 2009, 10:02 AM

If you use XSLT 2.0 then simply sort into a variable e.g.

Code:

<xsl:variable name="sortedCountries">
<xsl:for-each select="countries/country">
                <xsl:sort select="name"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:variable>

then process the sorted elements in the variable and following-sibling should give you the following sibling in sort oder.

If you are using XSLT 1.0 then you can also sort into a variable but you need to use an extension function like exsl:node-set first on the variable before you can use XPath like following-sibling on that.