Re: for vs. for-each

$values[.] obviously doesn't work because the value of the context item within square brackets is different from the value outside.

The fact that the value of "." is context-dependent often causes difficulties like this, but it's fundamental to the design of XPath..

The real culprit here is the overloading of A[B] to do both subscripting and filtering. Changing the focus is necessary for filtering, but it gets in the way for subscripting. I would argue that this is a design mistake (in fact, I tried to argue this before XPath 1.0 was finalized) but it's impossible to change it now. For 4.0, however, I would like to see better ways of accessing items in a sequence by position, and there has been much discussion about how best to achiieve this.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

> On 14 Mar 2021, at 18:04, Michael Müller-Hillebrand [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 
> Given a variable with a sequence of values
> 
> <xsl:variable name="values" select="(1,2,3,4,5)" as="xs:double+"/>
> 
> these are three methods to report its content
> 
> <xsl:sequence select="for $i in 1 to count($values) return $values[$i]"/>
> 
> <xsl:for-each select="1 to count($values)">
>    <xsl:sequence select="$values[.]"/>    
> </xsl:for-each>
> 
> <xsl:for-each select="1 to count($values)">
>    <xsl:sequence select="$values[current()]"/>    
> </xsl:for-each>
> 
> The first works as expected, the second does not, but the third astonishingly enough gives me the same result as the first. Check it out:
> 
> https://xsltfiddle.liberty-development.net/ei5R4v8/2
> 
> I read/understand that there is a difference between a for expression and a path expression, but since we can use atomized values in xsl:for-each, I would like to see more similarity between for and for-each.
> 
> Should this be on the wishlist for XSLT 4 or do I have to learn/understand some more concepts?
> 
> Puzzled greeting,
> 
> - Michael
> 
> 
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