Question

I want to be able to count “end points” in an XML file using XSL.
By endpoint I mean tag’s with no children that contain data.

i.e.

<xmlsnippet> 
    <tag1>NOTENOUGHDAYS</tag1> 
    <tag2>INVALIDINPUTS</tag2> 
    <tag3> 
        <tag4> 
            <tag5>2</tag5> 
            <tag6>1</tag6> 
        </tag4> 
    </tag3> 
</xmlsnippet> 

This XML should return 4 as there are 4 “end points”

Answer 1

<xsl:template match="/>
  <xsl:value-of select="count(//*[not(*) and normalize-space() != ''])" />
</xsl:template>

This recurses the entire XML tree via the descendant axis (//), looks at all element nodes (*) that have no child element nodes (not(*)) and contain data other than whitespace (normalize-space() != '').

The resulting node-set is counted (and returns 4 in your case).