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XSLT
book

XSLT

by Doug Tidwell
August 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
480 pages
11h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XSLT

XPath Datatypes

An XPath expression returns one of four datatypes:

node-set

Represents a set of nodes. The set can be empty, or it can contain any number of nodes.

boolean

Represents the value true or false. Be aware that the true or false strings have no special meaning or value in XPath; see Section 4.2.1.2 in Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of boolean values.

number

Represents a floating-point number. All numbers in XPath and XSLT are implemented as floating-point numbers; the integer (or int) datatype does not exist in XPath and XSLT. Specifically, all numbers are implemented as IEEE 754 floating-point numbers, the same standard used by the Java float and double primitive types. In addition to ordinary numbers, there are five special values for numbers: positive and negative infinity, positive and negative zero, and NaN, the special symbol for anything that is not a number.

string

Represents zero or more characters, as defined in the XML specification.

These datatypes are usually simple, and with the exception of node-sets, converting between types is usually straightforward. We won’t discuss these datatypes in any more detail here; instead, we’ll discuss datatypes and conversions as we need them to do specific tasks.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596000537Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata