Question

I was wondering how this predicate([1]), is hardcoded as 1 always in the muenchian grouping. The concept was not clear for me, after a lot of search. It is explained as the current node, is compared with the 1st group returned by the key.
Why does it always compare with the first one that a key is matched?
Also why are we giving contact[count(. | key('contacts-by-surname', surname)[1]) = 1], the =1 part? again 1 is hardcoded. I referred the below link

http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/grouping/muenchian.html

Answer 1

I was wondering how this predicate([1]), is hardcoded as 1 always in
the muenchian grouping.

This is simple:

The key() function produces all nodes for a given group, and we want to take just one node from any group.

It isn’t guaranteed that all groups will have two or more nodes in them — some might have just one node.

This is why it is safe and convenient to take the first (and possibly the only) node from each group.

We could equally well do the grouping taking the last node from each group (but this will be less efficient):

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:key name="kNumByMod3" match="num"
  use=". mod 3"/>

 <xsl:template match=
  "num[generate-id()
      =
       generate-id(key('kNumByMod3', . mod 3)[last()])
      ]
  ">


  3k + <xsl:value-of select=". mod 3"/>:
<xsl:text/>
  <xsl:copy-of select="key('kNumByMod3', . mod 3)"/>
 </xsl:template>
 <xsl:template match="text()"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on this XML document:

<nums>
  <num>01</num>
  <num>02</num>
  <num>03</num>
  <num>04</num>
  <num>05</num>
  <num>06</num>
  <num>07</num>
  <num>08</num>
  <num>09</num>
  <num>10</num>
</nums>

produces the wanted, correctly grouped result:

  3k + 2:
<num>02</num>
<num>05</num>
<num>08</num>


  3k + 0:
<num>03</num>
<num>06</num>
<num>09</num>


  3k + 1:
<num>01</num>
<num>04</num>
<num>07</num>
<num>10</num>