This is the mail archive of the
xsl-list@mulberrytech.com
mailing list .
A better way to build a comma-delimited list
- From: John Sands <WonkoWatson at Yahoo dot com>
- To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
- Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 22:34:47 -0400
- Subject: [xsl] A better way to build a comma-delimited list
- Reply-to: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
I have some XSLT that builds a SQL select statement from several input
documents. Here's a fragment that builds the column list by getting
each distinct column name from a separate file ($pbsdef) and checking
that is is defined in another file (referenced by variable $dbdef).
<xsl:text>select </xsl:text>
<xsl:for-each select="document($pbsdef)/pbsdef/column[not(@dbcolumn=preceding-sibling::column/@dbcolumn)]">
<xsl:variable name="p" select="position()"/>
<xsl:variable name="l" select="last()"/>
<xsl:variable name="dbcolumn" select="@dbcolumn"/>
<xsl:for-each select="$dbdef">
<xsl:if test="key('dbdef-cols', $dbcolumn)">
<xsl:value-of select="$dbcolumn"/>
<xsl:if test="$p < $l">
<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
The output of this fragment might be:
select col1, col2, col3
This all works fine, except for one case - where the last column is
not found in the $dbdef file (where the 'if test=key' fails). Then I
get:
select col1, col2,
The position() < last() test doesn't work here. Can someone see a
better way to avoid that last comma?
Thanks,
John Sands
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list