>does xalan support all kinds of xpath statements? Xalan should support everything in the standard XPath language, modulo any bugs that might exist. Standards compliance is a sine qua non for us...
>does it support, for example count(...) or string functions like 'starts-with()'? If it's in the XPath spec, we support it. These are, and we do. >if it can then how? I'm not sure which question you're asking. If you want to know how to use them, the XPath spec and/or any XPath tutorial will provide your answer. If you want to know how we've coded that support, Xalan is open-source; read the code. These are implemented in the org.apache.xpath.functions package, one class per function..., but there's a lot of other code you'll want to read to understand how they're invoked and why they work the way they do. If you want to know how to write your own functions, look at the documentation for extension functions. It isn't quite as easy to call extensions from XPath as from XSLT -- basically, you have to work with the API to tell us which extensions you want to add to the dictionary -- but it should be doable. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research
