Re: possible to mimic while-like behavior?

[Mike Brown <mike at skew dot org>]

> On Thu, 16 Mar 2000 sara.mitchell@ps.ge.com wrote:
> Arnold, Mike: if your solutions(s) DO in fact address "do blah
> until you find the first foo where not bar" let me know -- I don't see how
> they might do so.

I was showing you an example of how to use a named template that calls
itself to simulate the perl-style snippet you posted. The "blah" part is
somewhat ambiguous but it is pretty obvious that at some point "blah" will
result in $foo not being able to pass the test that would result in
another iteration. So I think it does in fact address your situation, but
like you said, you didn't provide much info, so I kept my answer pretty
generic. If you provide specific XML and say what you want to do, it will
be easier to tune the example to be more precise.

While loops generally involve preservation of state between iterations, ie
side-effects, of which XSLT is free. I mean, you give something 'external'
like a variable a particular state, and at each iteration of the loop the
state of that thing is tested. Presumably either something in the loop
will change the state of that thing, or some other concurrent process will
alter it, and then the loop will exit. Well, you can't change the value of
a variable in XSLT, so that's why I did the 'newfoo' assignment, to
simulate the change of state of 'foo' for the next iteration.

It is also possible that mimicking a while loop may not be the appropriate
solution for whatever it is you want to do. I mean, if you're only wanting
to process nodes for which certain conditions are true, that can be
accomplished with an XPath expression with predicates, in an xsl:for-each
or xsl:apply-templates.

   - Mike
___________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer, Webb Interactive Services
XML/XSL stuff: http://www.skew.org/    http://www.webb.net/


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