Hi,

I would like to get some help on understanding the different result of XSL transformation done in
- Java Applet (that creates and displays HTML output with XSLT)
- command line - tried with 4 XSLT engines: xsltproc, Saxon 6.5.5, XalanJ 2.7.1, simple JAXP(javax.xml.transform.Transformer).

I have a variable that contains a number with scientific notation:
where the value is between '' (apostrophes).
For

• Applet: 1.0E-6: [NaN]
• xsltproc: 1.0E-6: [ 1e-06]
• Saxon: 1.0E-6: [NaN]
• XalanJ: 1.0E-6: [NaN]
• JAXP: 1.0E-6: [0.000001]

If the
where the value is without '' (apostrophes).
for the same XSL

• Applet: 0.0000010: [0.0000010]
• xsltproc: 1.0E-6: [ 1e-06]
• Saxon: Error in expression 1.0E-6: Unexpected token <name> beyond end of expression
• XalanJ: SystemId Unknown; ... 1.0E-6 could not be formatted to a number!
• JAXP: ERROR: 'Syntax error in '1.0E-6'.' FATAL ERROR: 'Could not compile stylesheet'

In XSLT 1.0 the notation '1.0e-6' should NOT be accepted either as a literal in an XPath expression (should be a syntax error) or as input to number() (should produce NaN). In XSLT 2.0 it should be accepted by both.

Looks like you have found some non-conformant XSLT 1.0 processors.

(JAXP is not the name of an XSLT processor, by the way. It is the name of an API supported by several XSLT processors, including two of those on your list, Saxon and Xalan-J. You need to be more precise about which processor you are referring to here. I suspect the one that is distributed with the Sun/Oracle JDK - which is notoriously buggy.)

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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

Thanks Michael.

You are right the Applet and the last XSLT processor (that I inaccurately called JAXP) is using Sun/Oracle J2SE 5.0 that is JAXP 1.3 reference implementation (according to http://jaxp.java.net/1.3/index.html) supporting XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0.

Actually when I get NaN that's fine.

When I convert the 1.0E-6 value to fixed point number with a recursive xsl that results in [0.0000010000000000000002] that is still fine...

Now the output of for the same XSL is:
Applet: 0.0000010000000000000002:[0.005362758289192256]
xsltproc: 1e-06:[ 1e-06]
Saxon: 0.0000010000000000000002:[0.0000010000000000000002]
XalanJ: 0.0000010000000000000002:[0.0000010000000000000002]
JAXP: 1.0000000000000002E-6:[0.0000010000000000000002]

As I wrote the Applet and the last XSLT processor are using the same J2SE code (from class javax.xml.transform.Transformer) but they Applet gives totally wrong value for the number() function.

Do you think it's a bug in the J2SE JAXP implementation?

Hi All,

I write here my lessons learned while investigating this problem.
Actually the cause of the different XSLT result was not the Applet but a separate jar file.
The Applet can create various outputs including PDF with Apache's FOP. The xalan.jar (from FOP) was included in the classpath and interfered with the XSL implementation in J2SE 5.0.

Regards,