detecting non-existent attribute in XSL

[Greg Sandell]

Suppose I have the following XML:

<root>
<homepage>
<title country="France">Welcome to our French friends:
Homepage</welcome>
<title country="England">Welcome to our English friends:
Homepage</welcome>
</homepage>
<aboutUsPage>
<title>Welcome to our Friends: About Us</title>
</aboutUsPage>
</root>

The idea here is that the home page has a country-specific title, and the About Us page has one title for all countries. Imagine much more XML with lots of other nodes marked up in this way.

What I want is an XSL template that will give me all the nodes that are specific to a country, plus all the country-non-specific nodes. Here is some pseudo XSL for what I would like to do (using an English-specific example):

<xsl:template match="//node[@country = 'England'] |
//node[isnull(@country)]">
</xsl:template>

Of course, there is no such thing as an isnull function. But is there SOME way for me to detect nodes that lack a country attribute?

Any solution which does not require a change to my XML would be appreciated. (i.e. I don't want to add "country=all" to the generic nodes.)

Thanks,
Greg Sandell

 

[Richard Tobin]

<xsl:template match="//node[@country = 'England'] |
//node[isnull(@country)]">

Of course, there is no such thing as an isnull function.

count(@country)=0

-- Richard

 

[Dimitre Novatchev]

Of course, there is no such thing as an isnull function. But is

there SOME way for me to detect nodes that lack a country attribute?

//*[not(@country)]

There are good books on XSLT and XPath out there -- why not get one and read it?

=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL