node-set EXSLT common node-set public domain 4 Jeni Tennison 2002-06-10 Made explicit that exsl:node-set() should not have any side effects. 4.1 Craig Stewart 2002-08-20 Added Xalan-J implementation to the list. 4.2 Craig Stewart 2002-11-12 Fixed an error in the description of the function and updated the 4XSLT version to 0.12.0a3 and that it now supports v4 of exsl:node-set.
The exsl:node-set function returns a node-set from a result tree fragment (which is what you get when you use the content of xsl:variable rather than its select attribute to give a variable value). This enables you to process the XML that you create within a variable, and therefore do multi-step processing. You can also use this function to turn a string into a text node, which is helpful if you want to pass a string to a function that only accepts a node-set.

The purpose of the exsl:node-set function is to return a node-set from a result tree fragment. If the argument is a node-set already, it is simply returned as is. If the argument to exsl:node-set is not a node-set or a result tree fragment, then it is converted to a string as by the string() function, and the function returns a node-set consisting of a single text node with that string value.

The exsl:node-set function does not have side-effects: the result tree fragment used as an argument is still available as a result tree fragment after it is passed as an argument to exsl:node-set.

EXSLT common node-set 1 Mike Kay 2001-04-28 Tests node-set to node-set conversion. This use case shows the result of using exsl:node-set() to convert a result tree fragment to a node-set. EXSLT common node-set 1 Mike Kay 2001-04-28 Tests result tree fragment to node-set conversion. This use case shows the result of using exsl:node-set() to convert a result tree fragment to a node-set.