Removing duplicate elements a-priori?

[Gordon Vidaver <gvidaver at bbn dot com>]

Hi,
	I'm trying to remove duplicate elements from an output document.  I've 
seen the examples for doing this in the archives, but they all seem to 
assume some knowledge of the structure of the input document.  For example:

	<xsl:for-each select="item[not(.=preceding-sibling::item)]"> 	
	  <xsl:sort/>

	But with this you need to know that there is an element named "item" in 
the input.

	For example I want to take :

	<doc>
	<employee>Bill</employee>
	<employee>Andy</employee>
	<employee>John</employee>	
	</doc>

	And produce just :

	<doc>
	<employee>Bill</employee>
	</doc>

	without knowing that there is an employee tag in the input.

	Any help would be most appreciated.

	Thanks,

	Gordon Vidaver


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list