Inspirational Technology: Fun with contains

Fun with contains

In my previous post I was demonstrating how you can include the output of an XPath query in your posts. What also turned up is how you have to be careful with the contains query. If you notice in the first table Annie Lennox shows up more often then you'd expect, this is the result of the contains query matching on the table element included in the post for the second query. Since it matches on the contents of the XPath and XSL-T is good at recursive processing it happily evaluates the query and includes the output. I'm not sure if that's such a bad thing.

A slight modification to the query will get the expected results.

<xpath-query>/item//table[tr[contains(.,'Annie Lennox')]]</xpath-query>

Artist	Song	Album	Play Count
Metallica	Frantic	St. Anger	12
Massive Attack	Antistar	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Butterfly Caught	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Everywhen	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Future Proof	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Name Taken	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Hymn Of The Big Wheel (Origin	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	11
Metallica	Dirty Window	St. Anger	11
Metallica	My World	St. Anger	11
Annie Lennox	A Thousand Beautiful Things	Bare	10
Annie Lennox	Bitter Pill	Bare	10
Annie Lennox	Erased	Bare	10
Evanescence	Bring Me To Life (Feat. Paul	Fallen	10
Massive Attack	Prayer For England	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Small Time Shot Away	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Special Cases	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	What Your Soul Sings	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Any Love (Larry Heard Mix)	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Massive Attack	Home Of The Whale	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Massive Attack	Hymn Of The Big Wheel (Nellee	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Annie Lennox	Honestly	Bare	9
Annie Lennox	Loneliness	Bare	9
Annie Lennox	Oh God (Prayer)	Bare	9
Evanescence	Everybody`s Fool	Fallen	9
Evanescence	Going Under	Fallen	9

Posted by Kimbro Staken

Wednesday Sep 17, 2003 at 4:12 AM