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Asked: 2026-06-16T11:13:35+00:00

I have an XSL program which in turn generates an XSL program, which depending

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I have an XSL program which in turn generates an XSL program, which depending on the input might look like this:

<xsl:variable name="patterns"/> <!--empty in this particular case-->

<xsl:template name="token">
    <xsl:for-each select="$patterns/pattern">
...

When I then run the generated stylesheet, Saxon, bless its heart, is apparently doing some kind of static analysis and complains:

XPTY0019: Required item type of first operand of '/' is node(); supplied value has item type xs:string

and won’t even compile the stylesheet.

My workaround was to generate a dummy element in the $patterns nodeset, but is there any cleaner approach here, or way to suppress the compile error?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    According to http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#variable-values, “If the variable-binding element has empty content and has neither a select attribute nor an as attribute, then the supplied value of the variable is a zero-length string.”.

    So you need to change that, for instance by doing <xsl:variable name="patterns" select="()"/> to bind an empty sequence as the variable value.

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