XSLT Reference |  |
XSLT Reference | |
In addition to the XPath functions defined above, XSLT supplies a number of additional functions.
The current()
function returns a node-set containing only the current
(context) node.
In most situations, this is exactly the same result as
the XPath expression ".", but there is one case
with a very important difference.
Recall that XPath expressions can have several levels
of selection. For example, the XPath expression
"park/tree"
selects <park> children
of the context node, and then it selects <tree> children of
those nodes. So at each stage of
evaluation of that XPath expression, "." has a different meaning:
at each stage it means the set of nodes selected so far.
The critical difference in the current() function is that it
always refers to the node that was the context node
before any of the XPath expression was evaluated.