I have two questions related to tokenized values.


First question: I would like to grab the number of tokenized values using position() rather than count, however, the following code does not work:

XML input =
<el values="40.655 50.353 60.997 20.31"/>

XSL instructions =
<xsl:variable name="tokenizedVal" select="tokenize(@values,' ')" />
<xsl:variable name="valcount" select="$tokenizedVal[last()]/position()"/>

It does work when I use count(), but I was trying to avoid using it. Is there a way to use position() to return the number of tokenized values?



Second question: I would also like to assign an xs type to the $tokenizedVal variable, but I am receiving the following error message:

"Required item type of value variable $tokenizedVal is xs:float; supplied value has item type xs:string"

XSL instruction =
<xsl:variable name="tokenizedVal" select="tokenize(@values,' ')" as="xs:float" />

Is their a way to assign the datatype when assigning the variable?

To solve the first question, I realized I should use index-of() instead of position() since my values are not nodes. The following seems to do the trick.

<xsl:variable name="valcount" select="index-of($tokenizedVal,$tokenizedVal[last()])"/>

I am still interested in suggestions for handling the second question.

Thanks!

Why on earth would you want to write something as convoluted as index-of($tokenizedVal,$tokenizedVal[last()]) in place of count($tokenizedVal)? It's not even correct, except in the special case where all the tokens are different.

as="xs:float" asserts that the value is a float, it does not convert it to a float. To convert the sequence of strings to a sequence of floats, use

for $x in tokenize(...) return xs:float($x)

Do you really want float? It loses an awful lot of precision. Using xs:double is almost certainly a better choice.

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

Incidentally if you're really determined to avoid count(), you could do

($values/position())[last()]

but I really can't think of any reason why you would want to.

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