Question

My intent is in an XSL, to display only once the text node for set of nodes with a common value. For example, I have the following XML:

<Nodes>
    <Node att="1">A</Node>
    <Node att="1">B</Node>
    <Node att="2">C</Node>
    <Node att="2">D</Node>
    <Node att="3">E</Node>
</Nodes>

My output would be: “ACE”.

I don’t know what the values of the attribute “att” will be. It can be any string.

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

This can even be done just in a single XPath expression:

/*/*[not(@att=preceding-sibling::*/@att)]/text()

So, wrapping it in XSLT gives us:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output method="text"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:copy-of select="/*/*[not(@att=preceding-sibling::*/@att)]/text()"/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

and applying this to the provided XML document:

<Nodes>
    <Node att="1">A</Node>
    <Node att="1">B</Node>
    <Node att="2">C</Node>
    <Node att="2">D</Node>
    <Node att="3">E</Node>
</Nodes>

produces the wanted, correct result:

ACE