How to use contains() with a set of strings in XSLT

Question

I have the following XML snippet:

<figure customer="ABC DEF">
    <image customer="ABC"/>
    <image customer="XYZ"/>
</figure>

I'd like to check if the figure element's customer attribute contains the customer attributes of the image elements.

<xsl:if test="contains(@customer, image/@customer)">
    ...
</xsl:if>

I get an error saying:

a sequence of more than one item is not allowed as the second argument of contains

It's important to note that I cannot tell the values of the customer attributes in advance, thus using xsl:choose is not an option here.

Is it possible to solve this without using xsl:for-each?

G. Ken Holman · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-01 14:47:50Z

2

In XSLT 2.0 you can use:

test="image/@customer/contains(../../@customer, .) = true()"

and you will get a true() result if any of them are true. Actually, that leads me to suggest:

test="some $cust in image/@customer satisfies contains(@customer, $cust)"

but that won't address the situation where the customer string is a subset of another customer string.

Therefore, perhaps this is best:

test="tokenize(@customer,'\s+') = image/@customer"

... as that will do a string-by-string comparison and give you true() if any of the tokenized values of the figure attribute is equal to one of the image attributes.

answered Oct 1, 2013 at 14:47

G. Ken Holman

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