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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T17:30:34+00:00

New to XML/XSL/Xpath, and I’ve scoured these boards for an answer to a seemingly

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New to XML/XSL/Xpath, and I’ve scoured these boards for an answer to a seemingly simple problem, but maybe I’m too new to XSL to understand some of the answers out there that might address this.

I want to select a set of nodes that match a different set of node values stored elsewhere in the doc, so that:

<body>
    <partlist>
        <part>head</part>
        <part>spleen</part>
        <part>toe</part>
    </partlist>
    <parts>
        <head>this is a head</head>
        <spleen>this is a spleen</spleen>
        <toe>big toe</toe>
        <toe>big toe</toe>
    <parts>
</body>

So that, let’s say I want to count all the “parts”, but I don’t know the “parts” node names, I would want an XPath expr to match a set of nodes whose names are equal to the values of another set of nodes…

I am new enough to XSL to both imagine that a solution is very simple, but experienced enough to realize that expecting a simple solution from XSL is a sure wrong path.

In my procedural-based ignorance, this is what I have tried:

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="partlist/part">
        <xsl:with-param name="parts" select="parts"/>
    </xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="part">
    <xsl:param name="parts"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="count($parts[.])"/>        
</xsl:template>

But this is completely wrong. Any help is much appreciated.

Edit: Thanks for the answers, but I think I’m not being understood – the fault is mine, because I haven’t been perfectly clear… What I need is a single result telling me if there are ANY nodes that match the node value of the referring set… that I think changes the query, because I’m not trying to output a list of counts, I’m trying to match a set against a set to count the total… but let me clarify with XSL, if such a thing is possible.. here’s my code from above, slightly modified to make my intention clear:

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="partlist/part">
        <xsl:with-param name="parts" select="parts"/>
    </xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="part">
    <xsl:param name="parts"/>
    <xsl:if select="count($parts[.]) &gt; 0">1</xsl:if>        
</xsl:template>

the above when applied to the xml doc example should output:

1

Does this make sense?

Edit: I should also specify that I am limited to XSL 1.0

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use the local-name() function to get the name of a node so you can compare it against a given value.

    For example, your stylesheet could be modified to this:

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

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="body/partlist/part"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="part">
    <xsl:variable name="part" select="."/>
    <xsl:value-of select="count(/body/parts/*[local-name() = $part])"/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

    Edited to add:

    You can also compare against sets of values instead of just single values. From XPath 1.0 spec, section 3.4:

    If one object to be compared is a node-set and the other is a string,
    then the comparison will be true if and only if there is a node in the
    node-set such that the result of performing the comparison on the
    string-value of the node and the other string is true.

    If you want to count how many elements you have under /body/parts whose local name matches the parts listed in /body/partlist/part, you could do it with this XPath expression:

    count(/body/parts/*[local-name() = /body/partlist/part])

    The last transformation from the question, added after the edit, could be rewritten for example like this:

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

  <xsl:template match="body">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="partlist">
      <xsl:with-param name="parts" select="parts"/>
    </xsl:apply-templates>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="partlist">
    <xsl:param name="parts"/>
    <xsl:if test="count($parts/*[local-name() = current()/part]) &gt; 0">1</xsl:if>        
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
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