Variable variables in XSLT?

[me']

I'm passing an XSLT stylesheet the name of an element I want it to retrieve, but I have a problem. Here's the code I'm using at the moment to retrieve that element:

<xsl:value-of select="$toget" />

Which obviously doesn't work: It just returns whatever I passed it!

Is there anyway to do this short of <xsl:when><xsl:choose>?

[brothercake]

XSLT doesn't have variables, only constants.

How are you passing the name of the element?

[me']

In a variable called 'toget':

<xsl:param name="toget" />

The name of the element I need to retrieve is in there. For example, it could be 'title' and I would need everything between <title> and </title>.

ps: constants are variables

[[email protected]]

Which parser are you using? With MSXML you might be able to do it by combining unparsed-entity-uri() and node-set...

[brothercake]

Originally posted by me'
ps: constants are variables

Are they? I thought constants were immutable?

[Nightfire]

Constant and variable sorta give it all away. Constant always has the same value and can never change, which means it's always constant and a variable has a variable value which can change.

[liorean]

Well, here you have a difference in computer language terms and mathematical terms. In computer languages the word 'variable' really should be thought of as 'container'. For example, you may declare a variable a constant, which by mathematical terminology would mean it is not a variable. In mathematical terms the difference is the mutability though.


The reason for this?
Computer languages use variables as containers, to which you define access rights. They may be read only, constants (which is not exactly the same as read only, though the difference is hard to explain), write only or read-write, but you still speak of them as variables.

[me']

*cough* back on topic here?

Originally posted by [email protected]
Which parser are you using? With MSXML you might be able to do it by combining unparsed-entity-uri() and node-set...

My parsing method is fairly complicated. I'm using PHP, and when I want to weed out a value, I whip up a XSLT stylesheet and use the XSLT functions with a few parameters passed to get it.

Example: I have a stylesheet to parse a file containing a months' blog posts and spit it out in nicely formatted fashion:

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

<xsl:template match="blog">
	<xsl:for-each select="post[position() = 1]">
		<h2><a href="{uri}"><xsl:value-of select="date" /> {[mdash]} <xsl:value-of select="title" /></a></h2>
		<xsl:for-each select="postbody/paragraph">
			<p><xsl:value-of select="." /></p>
		</xsl:for-each>
	</xsl:for-each>
	<xsl:for-each select="post[position()!=1]">
		<h2><a href="{uri}"><xsl:value-of select="date" /> {[mdash]} <xsl:value-of select="title" /></a></h2>
		<p><xsl:value-of select="description" /></p>
	</xsl:for-each>  
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>