How do I find the number of elements in a <xs:list> using XSLT?

Question

I have an XML schema that contains the following type :

<xs:simpleType name="valuelist">
  <xs:list itemType="xs:double"/>
</xs:simpleType>

A sample XML fragment would be:

<values>1 2 3.2 5.6</values>

In an XSLT transform, how do I get the number of elements in the list?

How do I iterate over the elements?

Answer 1

I. XPath 2.0 (XSLT 2.0) solution:

count(tokenize(., ' '))

II. XPath 1.0 (XSLT 1.0) solution:

 string-length()
-
 string-length(translate(normalize-space(), ' ', ''))
+ 1

As for iteration over the items of this list:

1. In XPath 2.0 / XSLT 2.0 just use the above XPath 2.0 expression as the value of a select attribute:

--

 for $i in tokenize(., ' '),
     $n in number($i)
  return
    yourXPathExpression

--

2. In XSLT 1.0 you need to have some more code for splitting/tokenization. There are several good answers to this question (part of them mine) -- just search for something like "xslt split a string"

Answer 2

If list is strictly spaced, you can count spaces based on string length.

<values>1 2 3.2 5.6</values>

XSLT:

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

    <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:value-of select="string-length(values) 
                      - string-length(translate(values, ' ', '')) + 1"/>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

To iterate over elements you have to split this string. There a lot of examples at SO.